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

I thank the Deputies for their questions. PEACEPLUS is a really good programme. If you calculate how much money is being made available, which is over €1 billion, you can see that it is more than the previous INTERREG and PEACE programmes combined, so that is very positive.

It benefits 12 counties, not just the six counties of Northern Ireland, but also the six Border counties, including Sligo. It is a programme of real benefit. I am not sure it is 12 counties but it is more than nine anyway. I acknowledge that it is an EU programme but also that most of the funding comes from the UK Government. It is a 3:1 split as was the case with previous programmes, and the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform is the lead Department for us.

Regarding the Good Friday Agreement institutions, the Government remains very anxious that the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Executive should be restored as soon as is possible. As was noted by Deputy Smith, because the Assembly and the Executive are not working, the North-South Ministerial Council is not meeting at plenary nor at inter-ministerial level. I know sometimes people will say that the establishment of the Executive and the Assembly is a strand 1 issue and should not concern the Government here in Dublin. However, it does because without the Executive and the Assembly operating, strand 2, which is the North-South Ministerial Council, cannot operate. When it was working, it generally worked well and allowed for practical co-operation and for relationships to develop which is very important in building reconciliation. Even though it was a lot of time out of the diary to be going up and down to Armagh for meetings, it was worth it and I regret the fact that the council is not up and running. The same applies to the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly. It is about meeting and engagement, and about understanding each other a bit better. Often, we talk to each other but do not understand each other and that is only every corrected by familiarity and by building relationships. That is missing at the moment. Thankfully, the British-Irish Council and the British–Irish Intergovernmental Conference, BIIGC, are operating and look forward to hosting the British-Irish Council in Dublin Castle in November.

Deputy Ó Murchú asked about my talks with the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, DUP. It was a good conversation. The indications I was given was that things were slowly moving in the right direction. Of course, the difficulty we all understand at this stage is that they have been slowly moving in the right direction for a very long time but do not seem to have got to a conclusion yet. However, hopefully we will get to a conclusion and get there in a positive way.

On the UK legacy Act, this Act is now law. It received royal assent on 18 September. Many groups representing victims as well as many Members of this House have called for an inter-state case to be initiated before the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, with respect to this Act. The Government has sought legal advice on this matter. It has not yet received this advice but when it is finalised and received, we will consider carefully what action we should take and will need to take. No decision has been made on that yet.

Finally, Deputy Ó Murchú mentioned the possibility of a citizens' assembly on unification. I am not really sure that is the right model. The nature of a citizens' assembly is that it is a randomly selected 100 people. Those selected are random and representative and that would mean a citizens' assembly in which only one in seven of the people in that assembly would be British. Let us not forget that there are 1 million people on our island who identify as British. They identify as British because they are British and I am just not sure it would be the right start to say to that really important group of people on our island that they would only have representation of one in seven. I am not sure it would be possible to find people to participate. We really need to say to the minority on our island that we want you and we respect you and that there is a special place for you were unification ever to occur. A citizens' assembly could be the wrong start, quite frankly. A better model might be something like the New Ireland Forum established by the late Dr. Garret FitzGerald when he was Taoiseach. All of that is premature quite frankly. The priority now has to be doing all we can and making that best and last effort to get the Assembly and the Executive restored in order to bed down those institutions. I would be concerned that establishing a citizens' assembly and talk of a border poll and all those things, distract from what has to be the number one effort which is to get the Good Friday Agreement institutions up and running if at all possible.

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