Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I believe the Deputy and I are at one on this. I thank the other parties in the House for their co-operation on these issues. We share a concern because all parties in the House understand the complexity of this challenge but also the fragility and vulnerability of Northern Ireland and relationships North and South in the context of what we are trying to do here. Jonathan Powell, a former adviser to Tony Blair in the build-up to the Good Friday Agreement, put it very well in the past couple of days in the British media when he said that people just do not get this. It is not about facilitating trucks crossing the Border in terms of removing checks. It is about something much more fundamental than that, namely, identity. That is what the Good Friday Agreement tries to address in the context of a unionist identity and a nationalist identity, and allowing both to live together in the context of an island of Ireland that functions, with two jurisdictions but with real convergence between the two so that the Border is largely invisible. This fundamentally disrupts that. That is why the customs element of the proposal is a technical problem in terms of the integrity of the EU Single Market and how it would work because it would require checks somewhere. It is also a problem in the context of this identity issue, which we in Ireland understand only too well.

The response from the Barnier task force will be to engage. It is not going to go into some sort of secretive tunnel process, which some people have referred to.

The task force is anxious that there be full transparency in respect of the discussions and how they work. I hope that we will enter a period of serious discussion and negotiation in terms of whether we can work with the UK to move the proposals, which currently are not the basis for agreement, to a place where we can find a landing zone for agreement. We do not have much time to do that. I hope that the British side will be willing to do it.

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