Frank Feighan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I also attended the Ballymurphy inquest yesterday. I hope that the people will get justice and that the good names of their families will be finally vindicated. I heard the personal testimony of the relations of Fr. Hugh Mullan and Frank Quinn. I heard Frank Quinn's daughter, Angela Sloan, say that her mother cried herself to sleep every night in memory. She loved her husband so much. It was really heartbreaking. I hope the families of the Ballymurphy massacre get justice.

We talk about today as a big day with regard to Brexit. Probably the less said in this Parliament, the better today because it will have a major impact on what happens in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.Last weekend, we broke through a ceiling in commemoration of the hundreds of thousands of Irish men and women who fought in World War One but also the 50,000 Irishmen who died in World War One, especially the 30,000 from the Twenty-six Counties. When one sees what happened in Glasnevin, Islandbridge, St. Patrick's Cathedral, my home town of Boyle, Sligo, Kilkenny and Enniskillen, with Ministers in Belfast, Enniskillen and London, and the Taoiseach in Paris, these men who deserved remembrance after 100 years got it. There were tens of thousands of people from across communities who turned out on Sunday. I thank everybody. I was in Derry on Saturday night at the 20th anniversary of the opening of the peace park in Messines. I was speaking with Arlene Foster and Paddy Harte, son of Paddy Harte, and Jackie Barr, daughter of Glenn Barr. There should be support for the work groups and organisations have done to bring people from across communities and across the Border to Flanders and the peace park to outline the horrors of war.

When I was Co-Chairman of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, we brought Irish Deputies and Senators, along with British Members of Parliament, to that peace park and I remember leaving after seeing an inscription on a stone written by Patrick MacGill:

I wish the sea was not so wide that parts me from my love;

I wish the things men do below were known to God above!

I wish that I were back again in the glens of Donegal,

They’d call me a coward if I return but a hero if I fall!

May they rest in peace.