Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The breakdown of key relationships has been central to the ongoing crisis in North-South relations in recent years. I am sure the Taoiseach would agree that his statement last year that his relationship with the DUP was fine because he had Arlene Foster's mobile number was not really a reflection of reality. When the DUP went off with the European Research Group, ERG, Tories in their Brexit fantasies, it was never going to end well for them. However, the entire point of the peace settlement is that the betrayal of the DUP by the Tory fundamentalists is not something in which we can rejoice. What we are left with is the need to pick up the pieces of a badly damaged relationship. The peace settlement cannot work without cross-community and cross-government co-operation. The failure to show urgency on this in the past three years has done real damage. Should the withdrawal treaty be ratified, and all indications are that it will be, we need to move quickly to demonstrate our goodwill and the fact that we are sincere in saying that the special economic arrangements for Northern Ireland are not a threat to the constitutional rights embedded in the agreement.

In the last two weeks, all parties and governments have said they will engage in trying to re-establish the assembly and the Executive. We need something concrete in terms of a new process and new dynamics in the discussions or we will end up back with the two largest parties jockeying for who can declare victory over the other. What actions are proposed to build cross-community confidence in the new economic status of Northern Ireland? What specific efforts are proposed to get the democratic institutions restored before the need for yet another assembly election arises?

I would reiterate what I said yesterday in terms of what Deputy Howlin and others have said. I find it extraordinary that there is a framework there but it is deliberately not being used. The framework was deliberately collapsed. Everybody wants to go off again and have another discussion for the next ten years. A lot of people want people to work the institutions. If people are elected, they are expected to take their seats in the assembly or Executive and work for the benefit of the people. It is an extraordinary failure and an indictment of Sinn Féin initially, as it collapsed the assembly and the Executive, and of the DUP, which should have worked with Sinn Féin to restore it. Sinn Féin took a premeditated decision on the renewable heat incentive, RHI, scandal. We now learn from the inquiry that Sinn Féin was slow to close it down because unelected officials said the Minister for Finance in the North had to bow to them, to unelected officials within Sinn Féin. The emails are there. He sends emails to them. An Executive and an assembly is collapsed. If there is a scandal in the Republic we do not collapse the Dáil. We do not collapse the Government. We have an inquiry and try to get to the bottom of it. That is what should have happened. At a time when there was a huge threat economically to Northern Ireland I find it just incomprehensible that people could still try to justify not having an assembly and an Executive. Before we go anywhere else, will people in the North for God's sake demonstrate that they can work the institutions that are constitutionally there to be worked? That is a basic prerequisite for anything.

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