Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies for their questions. I will start with Deputy Brendan Smith, who asked the first question. He made the case in particular for making sure that the voices of disadvantaged young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, both North and South, from the Border area should be part of the dialogue. I think that is the case but I will double-check that it is with the unit, which falls under my Department, and come back to the Deputy in writing about it.

As I mentioned earlier, the forum met for the first time on 8 September in Dublin Castle. The Minister, Deputy Harris, addressed the forum. It contains 40 representatives from the North and 40 from the South and reflects gender, ethnic, community, faith and other identity diversities. The forum will meet and deliberate over the next year and set out its vision and values for a shared future on the island. It is focusing on five main themes, namely, sustainability, opportunity, well-being, equality, and also culture and identity. Two meetings have been held so far, one in Dublin and one in Antrim. The next meeting will be held on 20 October in the Aviva Stadium. I am keen that I should have some engagement with the forum as well at some point, certainly before it completes its work.

The forum is being organised by the shared island unit in the Department and that is being done in partnership with the National Youth Council of Ireland, NYCI, and also Youth Action Northern Ireland. We are very grateful to both those bodies for helping us to put it together.

Deputy Ó Murchú raised the issue of a cross-Border apprenticeship. If I picked it up right, I think the person is living in one jurisdiction and wishes to do an apprenticeship in the other. That is the kind of thing we should try to facilitate, so if the Deputy wants to pass on some information on the case, I will make sure the Minister, Deputy Harris, gets it and we will see what, if anything, we can do.

In relation to the shared island unit's research programme, part of the research it has done, which is very interesting, is comparing how systems work differently North and South, whether in education, criminal justice, local government or welfare - all of those things. That is useful in its own right because we can learn from each other. I am very interested in comparative analysis from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. It can be hard to make comparisons sometimes because people collect statistics differently and so on but it is a useful exercise in its own right because we can learn from best practice elsewhere. There are certainly things done better in the North than in the South and vice versa, but it would also be useful in the event of unification, were that to happen, because should there be a referendum on unification people will ask a lot of hard questions, very practical ones. What will happen to the health service? How will policing work? How will education work? How will the welfare system work? It will be important to be able to answer those questions to the extent that they can be answered. We are quite some way away from that but I think it is good that this work is being done, really for the first time.

Deputy Barry raised the issue of a strike in Armagh. My view, which is a simple one, is that companies should comply with whatever the labour laws are in the jurisdiction in which they operate. That is the way it should be, and it is what we would expect them to do.

Deputy Durkan raised the need for the shared island programme to be inclusive. I totally agree with that. Nobody should feel excluded. Part of what we are trying to do is to have a certain east-west element to it as well because some people in the Protestant-unionist-loyalist community may feel uncomfortable engaging with the shared island fund and the shared island unit but if we bring in an east-west dimension involving Scotland and Britain, that can help. I appreciate that there will be some people who just do not want to engage with it at all because it is a creature of the Irish Government, which is unfortunate, but we want to create pathways to make it easier for those who might wish to do so.

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