Frank Feighan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I commend the work of our Government and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Simon Coveney, for his ongoing work with all the parties in trying to restore the political institutions in the North. I know this Government is determined, as co-guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement, to ensure that all the institutions are working effectively, including a devolved Assembly and power-sharing Executive in Northern Ireland along with the North-South Ministerial Council.

There has been much talk of a united Ireland and we must ask ourselves what it is we want. Nearly 100 years ago my grandfather, James Feely, was a Sinn Féin councillor and a member of the IRA. He was arrested for a raid on Rockingham House for arms and guns. He went to Dublin on the train and 2,000 people saw those men off to be tried and sent to Mountjoy Prison. He joined the hunger strike with Austin Stack and they were granted their political demands. He was then sent to Belfast to be tried, where he was imprisoned. I, therefore, wonder what is a united Ireland. Is a united Ireland a single sovereign state? I have noticed how Sinn Féin does not talk about a united Ireland but about unity. We must look at it from a different point of view. We need to unite the minds of the people. We have one Ireland, but perhaps it is not the united Ireland that people have been talking about for the past 100 years.

At the same time that my grandfather was carried shoulder-high, 126 young men from my town in Boyle went to fight for Home Rule or whatever and never returned home. We forgot about these young men. Was that the united Ireland that we wanted? We have airbrushed them out of our history. The past 15 or 20 years, we have come to remember and commemorate the sacrifice and the lives of men who were Irish and of my DNA but who, because of some event in history in 1916, of which we are very proud and which we have commemorated, we have simply airbrushed out.

It is not a one-way street. A united Ireland has to be a two-way street, which is why I believe we need to do a lot more to reach out to unionism. We need to do an awful lot more to reach out and work on the relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom from a political perspective and in terms of a friendship.

I have chaired the Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and am still a member of the committee. Senator Black's trip to Rathlin island and Northern Ireland was positive and beneficial and we learned a lot. We need to do an awful lot more of that. We will be in Liverpool this weekend at the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly. It is a forum for good. It brings politicians from all sides together. I have noticed in Westminster, where there are 800 or so in the House of Lords and 600 or 700 in the other House, that there is huge goodwill towards the island of Ireland. That goodwill was not there when bombs were going off in London, Birmingham and Northern Ireland. We have come to a stage now where there is a huge amount of goodwill.

We speak of the Irish caucus in Washington. There is an Irish caucus on the next island which is made up of men and women who come from Roscommon, Northern Ireland and elsewhere. We need to work with them. That is why I am bringing perhaps 20 or 30 Oireachtas Members to Westminster on 6 November. It is because that is where those relationships are built up.The best day was the day of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which was signed 33 years ago. When one looks at 100 years and 33 years, one can see it is a third of 100 years. That agreement gave us a say in the affairs of Northern Ireland.

We are moving in the right direction and all the parties are working together. When we talk about a united Ireland, we need to unite the people of Ireland. We need one Ireland. There are people who automatically look away when we talk about it so we must choose our language correctly. I wish the Minister every success. I was in Manchester last week at that famous breakfast with Arlene Foster and Michelle O'Neill. It was frosty to a certain extent but one could see that the two leaders were trying to work together. We need to give them as much space as possible and we need to get the institutions up and running. Again, we have a role. Not all of us think the same way but the role is to have peace on the island of Ireland and peace for our neighbours. We have come a long way in the past 32 years since the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement.