Feargal Quinn (Independent)

Exactly. The entire Northern Ireland thing is difficult to explain to anybody outside. Some years ago at a board meeting of the Food Marketing Institute in Chicago I was asked to explain Northern Ireland in seven minutes. It was just after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. A number of people from North America said that they then understood for the first time. The explanation was basically one that people had not understood, which was that at the same time as North America was being settled by the settlers, mainly from England, the Ulster plantation took place. The Ulster plantation rewarded the soldiers from the other island with stretches of land. They took the best land in general and ousted those natives who happened to be of a different religion. People could not understand why we talk about fighting religions. It is not religions. It is traditions that are there and the ease with which people seem to believe there is a simple solution. The work that went into arriving at that solution last month is worthy of recognition and I am delighted we have done that today.

It is interesting talking about it today. Some people are concerned that it is not an agreement. Certainly the SDLP has a concern that it is an arrangement rather than an agreement. It does not please everybody and that party is concerned because it might only be held together until the British general election scheduled to take place by May. On that basis it is quite concerned. The issue of parades is something that frightens both sides and on that basis it was very difficult to get an agreement or an arrangement, whatever one likes to call it. It is a problem that is not easily solved in any situation, but democracy is about trying to get two sides to agree on that basis.

I hope the recent developments in the North serve the purpose of starkly reminding us that we should not take it for granted that these things happen easily. The stability that has been achieved in the North is always difficult to maintain. However, it has changed and improved the lives of so many people up there. It is a very fragile situation and violence is never far away, as has been mentioned today. Our economic circumstances here make us blinkered to our own interests. However, we should do our utmost to support peace in the North. Opinion polls suggest there is popular support for power sharing in the North. Even if it may not be working ideally, it is clear that the public want differences to be resolved by debate rather than by violence. We have a challenge down here.

Last week Senator Keaveney and I attended a round-table discussion hosted by the Institute for British-Irish Studies in the Royal Irish Academy. It was interesting to hear the views expressed there. Most of the discussion was on business and they talked about the objective of business being to try to get people together. I am very concerned that the further one goes from the Border, the more likely one is to be partitionist. I have a concern about those people who claim to buy Irish when referring to the Twenty-six Counties rather than the Thirty-two Counties. There have been and still are campaigns that exclude the North.

As I have previously told the Minister, in my business approximately 18 years ago we established a system of encouraging people to buy Irish. We put shamrock labels in front of the products on display in the supermarket and we had a computer system that identified at the checkout how much a customer spent on Irish goods. What jolted me was the number of people in our own company who asked what they should do with something from Northern Ireland. It never entered my mind that there would be a question about whether we should regard something from Northern Ireland as not being Irish, yet that question was asked. It has happened so clearly in recent times with the amount of travel to the North because for various reasons a significant number of people are travelling from the South to the North, crossing the Border for the first time in many cases. Many people have called to say it is unpatriotic. I believe the Twenty-six Counties and the Six Counties are all Ireland. We must avoid having people believe it is somebody else.

I have also previously told the story of going to buy a wedding present some years ago. I went to Kilkenny Design and picked a present for a couple getting married. I selected some linen. The Limerick person with me asked whether we should not buy some of our own. I asked what they meant. Were they suggesting my mother and father were not Irish? There is a mindset. I mentioned Limerick because it seems the further one gets from the Border, the more likely one is to regard those from the North as different and people we have not got to know. That is why I support the amendment so strongly. We are talking about not just a parliament but a civic forum, involving getting together, getting to know those across the Border and getting to regard the North as part of ourselves. If we can encourage more of our people on this side of the Border to get to travel to the North and more of those in the North to come to the South, then the more we get to know each other, the more likely it is we will be able to achieve success in that area.

At the meeting last week I gave this example. Someone looking at the Iarnród Éireann website will discover that three hours away is the city of Cork, which is a fine city, and there are 15 trains per day to Cork. However, Belfast is a bigger city than Cork on the same island and yet there are only eight trains going there. Iarnród Éireann is responding to a need.