Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I, too, am thankful for the opportunity to contribute to these important statements today. They come at a moment of huge sensitivity for the island as we solemnly remember the victims of Bloody Sunday in Derry. It is also a sensitive time for the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and, it should be said, for the conduct of our co-guarantor of that agreement in relation to legacy and on the question of the protocol. I hope I will get to that issue.

I am also a member of the Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, which is chaired by my Fine Gael party colleague, Deputy O’Dowd. It is a privilege to be on that committee, to be joined by MPs and MLAs from Northern Ireland, and for us to have the benefit of experience and shared knowledge as we work through the various groups.

I wanted to mention three groups. I will start with the most important, namely, the victims and their families. Last weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the utterly offensive and indefensible murders of civilians in Derry. Their families and communities still feel the hurt to this day. They were mowed down by paratroopers acting with complete inhumanity, entirely outside every law of the land and any law of humanity. The victims’ names were besmirched following the event and members of the community who were left behind were interned. Bloody Sunday was among the darkest of many dark days in the Northern Ireland of the time.

The treatment of the Bloody Sunday families in the Widgery report and in the many years to follow continued the state-sponsored hurt and pain that are felt to this day. They are by no means the only ones. We met the Springhill and Ballymurphy families in November, whose pain, again, was all too raw but their experience was vindicated, at least, by the Ballymurphy inquest in May of last year.

The damaging and unhelpful proposals by the British Government to allow an amnesty and not to pursue these cases of justice have been widely rejected and criticised in this House and across Northern Ireland. I join that chorus of condemnation of these unacceptable proposals. All victims of violence and their families deserve justice. In contrast to the turn of the back and the close of the heart which, it seems, has been given by the British Government in its proposals on legacy, we want to turn towards victims, pay our respects to them and give our true recognition to those victims of every community, as my colleague Deputy O’Dowd said, in their search for justice.

In that vein, and again at their specific request, I, too, want to highlight the case of the families of the disappeared, whom the committee met in Belfast in November and again in the committee rooms in the Oireachtas in December. They would simply like to give their family member a Christian burial.

They have called, both privately in our meeting and publicly in our committee room, on members of Sinn Féin to do everything they can to help achieve that. These families have asked me and others to continue to raise this matter in the House and publicly while there is still some chance of recovering bodies from bogs, as we go into yet another spring. We also met with the Commission for the Location of Victims Remains. The members of that commission know that every spring counts and that every piece of information counts as they go through more and more bog, forest and territory with no recoveries. I reiterate the calls made at the committee and countless times before by Dympna and Oliver McVeigh, brother and sister of Columba, and Maria Lynskey, sister of Joe, that we use our voices in the Dáil to call again for help for these people, in their final years, to recover these bodies. They also deserve peace and their killers, like the killers in Derry, deserve no amnesty.

These are issues of the past, which persist into the hurt of today, but of course we also have to look at Northern Ireland today. Again we face challenges from the British Government with the protocol and its operation. British Government representatives in Dublin and elsewhere tell us privately about the difficulties of the protocol for business but very little about the opportunities for Northern Ireland and businesses there. We had the good fortune to meet the Londonderry Chamber of Commerce before Christmas and we asked its chief executive, Paul Clancy, about its members' experience of doing business in Northern Ireland, sector by sector in Derry, based on its survey data. The view of those members was that the protocol is working for them. There are some technical issues but the opportunity is bigger than any hindrance. They stated that their experience is replicated across Northern Ireland, according to conversations with their sister chamber groups. They say stability is needed but that they will make it work.

We also asked business leaders about the quality of the communication received from the British Government. We keep hearing about how everything is so difficult but we are not hearing anything about the opportunities created by the unique circumstances of the protocol for Northern Ireland. Business leaders in Northern Ireland say that communication with the Executive is very good and straightforward and that they have very good access but that it is just not there with the British Government, either in terms of accessibility or quality. They stated at the committee: "... there are other priorities, as it were, with regard to what is going on either in England, Scotland or Wales rather than what is happening in Northern Ireland." That is their view. I highlight this because we cannot continue to neglect these issues or fail to call out the conduct of the British Government on all these matters.

On the future, we are a short while away from the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Though we have had great stability and good recovery in those 25 years, there is so much work left to be done for true reconciliation and the enhancement of mutual trust and understanding between communities. To that end, last week we had the good fortune to meet representatives of the Integrated Education Fund, IEF. There is so much work yet to be done. Paul Collins from the IEF described the current system as one that creates a group of young people: " ... divided into two tribes, who have no knowledge of the other." He told us the story of two tiny neighbourhood friends walking down the lane, with one turning to the right and one to the left as they went to their separate schools to begin their division into separate identities, at just aged four.

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