Frank Feighan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This is the United Kingdom that was supposed to be the home of democracy. I hear Boris Johnson, who will probably be the next Prime Minister, state that there are abundant technical solutions. I happened to be in Northern Ireland with the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly. We are doing a study on illicit cross-Border activity. It was shocking. We met with the head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI, and the head of An Garda Síochána. We went to the PSNI station in Crossmaglen. We had to go to Newry to be transported by seven armoured cars through 50 miles of south Armagh to Crossmaglen. This is what people call normal and where Boris Johnson thinks that there can be a technical solution. While we were in the PSNI barracks in Crossmaglen, all the automatic number plate recognition cameras around south Armagh had been cut down. There were only two outside the barracks in Crossmaglen and people are talking about technical solutions to make sure that there would not be a hard border. This simply cannot happen. I appeal to Boris Johnson or any Conservative leadership candidate to go and see south Armagh and the area by the Border. We face a difficult issue if we have a hard border.