Eoghan Harris (Independent)

One of the many valuable functions of the Seanad is to revisit questions that may have dropped off the screen. In that context, I remind Senators that the Northern Ireland football team beat Slovenia last night. It has barely registered on the radar of Irish newspapers, which gives the lie to the lip service that many people in the Republic of Ireland pay to the notions of republicanism and Irish unity. Therefore, I commend Senators Donohoe and Keaveney for returning Northern Ireland to the screen this morning. I ask the Leader of the House to ask the Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Justice, Equality and Law Reform to come to the House to give Senators a progress report on Northern Ireland. What I am seeing, slowly and surely, is the beginning of a rerun of the Provisional IRA campaign. When a policeman and a couple of soldiers were shot and killed recently, it represented a tightening of the screw that is being turned. The Real IRA and the Continuity IRA are starting to get more brazen, for example by functioning in public. They are tied deeply, of course, into the Shell to Sea campaign in the South. The predictions about unemployment that I made in this House before Christmas have proven to be correct. Around the same time, I reminded Senators that this is one island and warned of the dangers of dumping the problems of Northern Ireland in Northern Ireland and hoping they remain there.

If the group that is politically fronting for the Real IRA is active in the Republic of Ireland, it will become more active as the fragile social structure is leaned on by the economic crisis. Accordingly, I strongly recommend to this House that the Seanad can do great work to keep Northern Ireland firmly on the screen. The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform needs to crack down on these groups in the South. The Minister for Foreign Affairs should encourage the SDLP to stop pushing so hard on Sinn Féin on the green agenda. If the SDLP is more green than Sinn Féin, that will not help Sinn Féin to be flexible. Likewise, the Government should put pressure on the British Government to indicate to the UUP that it should take some of the pressure off the DUP. If the DUP is forced to out-unionise the UUP and Sinn Féin is forced to out-green the SDLP, no progress can be made. We need a devolution of policing. If that is to happen, Sinn Féin and the DUP will have to co-operate. The Republic of Ireland should use all its different arms to encourage the two parties to come to a quick and immediate solution on the devolution of policing, in order to put up bulwarks against the very sinister forces that are threatening both states on this island.