Frank Feighan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I also join in thanking my colleagues who took the time to visit Westminster on Monday and Tuesday. The meetings were very worthwhile. We need to do a lot more of this. We have taken our east-west relationship far too lightly because much more can be done. A total of €1 billion of trade is conducted every week between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. After the Queen's visit in 2011, the British-Irish Chamber of Commerce was set up. That tells us this was a relationship we took for granted. Much progress has been made since the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Good Friday Agreement. Relations are at an all-time high. There is a strong feeling of goodwill among the politicians from all sides in Westminster and there is a huge Irish diaspora that we sometimes do not understand. It is very vocal. We need to do much more of that. That is why I would like to thank Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, for taking the time out to meet us for an hour. It was a robust meeting. Our views were different but at least it was a good meeting with Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Emily Thornbridge, the Labour Party shadow foreign secretary, Ian Blackwood, the leader of the Scottish National Party in Westminster, and Adrian O'Neill, the Irish ambassador to the United Kingdom. When politicians from the United Kingdom come here, I urge all Members in this House to meet them. They will meet people who have fathers and mothers, and grandfathers and relations from the island of Ireland and their own areas. When they meet them, they will realise that we are very united in many ways.

I pay tribute to the Taoiseach for wearing the Irish poppy pin in the Dáil yesterday. It reflected the mature direction we are taking as a nation. When I first saw the poppy 25 years ago, I hesitated, thinking it was not mine. We have to remember the 50,000 young Irish men from the whole island, nationalists and unionists, who fell in the Great War. My favourite song about the poppy is the Green Fields of France: "Well the sun now it shines on the green fields of France, There's a warm summer breeze it makes the red poppies dance." We sing it and love this song and we should be able to embrace a part of our history that we conveniently airbrushed.