Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)

Coincidentally, I have my North-South Ministerial Council pen with me as a reminder that we only had the meeting in Farmleigh a couple of days ago - on Friday, I think.

Since the restoration of the Good Friday Agreement institutions last year, there have been 31 meetings of the North-South Ministerial Council in plenary, institutional and sectoral formats. There has been a huge body of work in the roughly 18 months that the institutions have been back up and running. The most recent plenary meeting took place on Friday, 17 October in Farmleigh, hosted by the Irish Government. The meeting provided an opportunity for Ministers to discuss a wide range of issues on mutual issues of concern, including business and trade matters, infrastructure and investment co-operation and emergency planning and preparedness. How do we work better together on emergencies, be they the likes of the pandemics we had to deal with in the past, or Storm Éowyn and the lessons from that? How do we tackle gender-based violence on the island? That is a frequent topic we have quite rightly been considering in the last while and there is a lot of benefit in discussing that on an all-island basis too.

A meeting of the North-South Ministerial Council in institutional format also took place on the same day. That is, effectively, where I meet with the First Minister and deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland on a number of institutional and cross-sectoral issues, including North-South bodies and EU-related matters. The outcomes of the meeting are detailed in full in the joint communiqué issued after the meeting and published on the North-South Ministerial Council website.

Reflecting on the work that has been undertaken over the past 18 months since the institutions have been back up and running, we have achieved multiple concrete outcomes from engagement in this framework, from health co-operation to environmental protection to improving co-ordination on disaster preparedness to investment in joint tourism infrastructure. It is fair to say the North-South Ministerial Council now has renewed momentum. I am fully committed, as is the Government, to ensuring that it continues to drive and facilitate strong North-South co-operation, supported in its work by the joint secretariat based in Armagh.

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