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

There is a difficulty with the citizens' assemblies in terms of timing, organisation and logistics because of Covid-19 and that has to be acknowledged. The existing Citizens' Assembly on gender issues has been delayed but it is meeting and engaging. I am open to working out the logistics of the range of issues that we want to put before citizens' assemblies, but we have to be realistic as well. The next one after the gender issues one is complete was meant to be the Dublin mayor Citizens' Assembly. I will ask my officials to discuss this with other parties and work out the logistical requirements in the context of Covid-19 and essentially in an online format. For the foreseeable future we are looking at how effective such meetings of citizens' assemblies can be and examining if we can run some in parallel, because there are three to four of them that people would be anxious to have. Given the slower pace of them, as a result of Covid-19, there will be problems around that.

I want to stress that in no way should that weaken the resolve and the work that is under way in tackling the drugs issue and the issues of recovery and a multidisciplinary response to addiction and recovery that is rooted in community and community participation. That is still required, irrespective of whether or when we have an assembly. There should be no let up in advances or progression on a range of issues around that because the world cannot stand still. We have to keep making decisions and policy, while getting it right with the Citizens' Assembly approach.

On a citizens' assembly on the Good Friday Agreement or on the question of Irish unity, I have set up a shared island unit within the Department of the Taoiseach, which is designed to scope out a range of issues about what it would be like to share this island and to examine how we can best share this island into the future, irrespective of people's views on the constitutional position. The Good Friday Agreement allowed for that and the genius of it was that it essentially meant we did not have to talk about constitutional issues every single day, and rather we could get to work on putting flesh on the bones of a lot of what is in the agreement. We have not succeeded in doing that within the institutions themselves because they have been too stop-start from the beginning of the agreement and have been in abeyance and suspended for a lot of the time.

There is a North-South dimension which needs strong momentum and impetus, and that is something I am committed to doing with the existing bodies. I am also committed to looking at investment in North-South infrastructure, which has been on the agenda for a decade. We want to take the initiative on that and follow through on the commitments made by the Irish Government in respect of New Decade, New Approach agreement.

There is a lot to be done. As opposed to grandstanding and indulging in rhetoric all of the time, an awful lot more can be done on putting flesh on the bones of the Good Friday Agreement, making it work and enabling it to work. In some respects, the North-South bodies have not been given the support and momentum they deserve. They did great work in the early phase of the Good Friday Agreement. Waterways Ireland, Tourism Ireland and InterTradeIreland all do effective work, but they need new momentum and an injection of support from all sides. The Irish Government will not be found wanting in that respect.

Likewise, in terms of health we need to intensify cross-Border co-operation, particularly in paediatric, cancer and oncology services, to a far greater degree than has been done to date. The community application of information technology, CAIT, initiative is one of the first and original initiatives on a cross-Border basis on health that has been added to in the utilisation of Altnagelvin hospital's oncology services and tertiary services for paediatrics. There are two fundamentally differently structured health services, however. In the North, it is essentially the National Health Service as experienced through the UK's historic model, although it is subject to a lot of pressure right now.

Our model evolved differently because we did not have the same social insurance provisions in post-war Ireland as developed in post-war Britain. In essence, that allowed for an initial voluntary hospital system to emerge from the beginning of the last century, which was religiously driven by various denominations, and then the State hospitals were introduced with the Health Act 1970. This involved the expansion of health board hospitals and then State hospitals at St. James's and Beaumont.

There was a very mixed evolutionary system in the Republic and that needs much reorganisation. It is a big question in terms of the alignment of that with the structures in the health service in Northern Ireland. With the shared island unit the idea is that we would commission substantive research to inform our perspectives. That would be my approach in the first instance.

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