Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Brexit crisis has shown the problem and irrationality of a border. It has exposed a fissure that has always existed within unionism between an ideological commitment to being part of Britain and economic self-interest, which has now been exposed in a way, frankly, that is favourable to the project of uniting this island and getting rid of the Border. We need to explore it, but this is where I strongly disagree with Deputy Micheál Martin. We have elected representatives in the North, and as much as everyone welcomes the peace in the North as an alternative to sectarian warfare, the fact is that the political structures within the Northern Ireland Assembly institutionalise sectarianism. It means that very important issues like corruption on a scale of hundreds of millions in the renewable heat incentive, RHI, scandal will only be debated through the prism of sectarian politics, where on a sectarian basis one camp can stop and essentially veto effective action to deal with something like corruption.

If we want to look at a country that we can learn something from, we should look at Lebanon. The political structures set up in the 1920s were almost exactly the same as the political structures that were set up in the Northern Ireland Assembly, which was institutionalised sectarianism based upon sectarian quotas, which did not work out very well for Lebanon.

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