John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I was thinking earlier about the term "the patience of Job", and I wondered what it meant, and who Job was. I googled it and found the following definition: "Job is presented as a good and prosperous family man who is beset by Satan with God's permission with horrendous disasters that take away all that he holds dear." I cannot help but think that some sort of analogy could be drawn with the patience that the Minister has shown in dealing with Brexiteers and the British Government, which seems to have a different plan every week, or no plan at all. That is a fair analogy to draw.

The issue I wish to raise concerns something to which I refer often, namely, the social fabric of the Border area. I only two miles from it, as the Minister will be aware. What I mean by that is that our communities are very intertwined across the Border, and have been able to become even more intertwined and prosperous as a result of the Good Friday Agreement over the past 20 years. That point is consistently lost on the British Government, the British media and people in the UK in general. They have little or no conception of what the social aspect of the Border is, and the social fabric that exists, from Omeath, County Louth all the way up to Donegal and right along and in between. The type of social fabric that I am talking about could include anything, whether it is being married to someone from across the Border, the kids going to school in north Louth but playing football in south Armagh, or living in south Armagh but working in Dundalk.I also want to make reference to how reassuring President-elect Joe Biden's views on Northern Ireland are. He has had a long-lasting and consistent view on it and it is a breath of fresh air compared with we have experienced. That has to make No. 10 Downing St. think about the approach it has taken towards Ireland, alongside that of President Donald Trump, over the past couple of years. That is reassuring.

Irrespective of whether we get a deal, these will still be issues in the Brexit debate. The first issue is customs, and we will have to examine what happens east to west. The second issue is standards, regulations and licences. The third is logistics and transport. There will be indirect impacts under all three of those headings that a lot of businesses and Border communities will not fully understand or grasp the effects of until quarter 1 of next year. That could involve customs or licensing issues or product standards. In terms of logistics and transport, in the case of perishable goods, for example, if logistics require an extra day or two and the shelf life of products is shortened that will reduce people's earning capacity. Those are the issues which I want to put on the record and which need to be examined. Whether we get a deal, they will still be serious issues that we will have to countenance and deal with.

The withdrawal agreement and the Northern Ireland protocol put Border counties like mine in a much stronger and more comfortable position than they were two-and-half or three years ago before they were put in place. At every turn, the Minister and European Union have stood up to the British Government. They have told it that it has entered into a withdrawal agreement in good faith and that there can be no renegotiation whatsoever. That is the bottom line. It is important that we maintain that stand, and I know we will.

I also want to make reference on a more local level to the work of local enterprise offices, LEOs, in making sure that businesses in Border areas are prepared to be Brexit ready. I have seen the number of workshops and seminars businesses in my area have been doing. Those in business in a Border community need to ask themselves, if they have not done so already, the extent to which their businesses are exposed to Brexit and what the scale of that will be. Brexit will turn some businesses upside down. Others will be marginally impacted upon. It is up to businesses to determine what the scale of the impact will be.

I had a wonderful conversation with Thomas McEvoy, who is in charge of the LEO in Dundalk. I do not want to be parochial but I want to speak to what I have knowledge of, which is my area. Mr. McEvoy said that businesses in Border region, particularly in the Dundalk area, have been on the frontier for 40 years in terms of the Troubles and Brexit. He went on to say that at every stage the resilient business people in the area have been incredible. They have had to deal with the Troubles, the cheaper Sterling exchange rate, which meant that people shopped in the North, economic recessions and now Brexit. There is a huge resilience within Irish people and our business community.

I am very confident that no matter what comes along in terms of Brexit next year they will be able to do their very best to overcome it. They will use the same level of ingenuity that they have always had to use. Much of that is down to the supports the Government has put in place. There have been significant financial supports to get businesses Brexit ready. A great deal of information has been provided. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

I read a wonderful article by the late A.A. Gill in The Sunday Timesabout a week after Brexit. He said he felt sorry for the younger generations in Britain who had such a bright future ahead of them as members of the European Union and that future was taken away by their parents' generation, which has an idealised view of what Britain was like in the 1940s and 1950s that is not relevant today. I hope that at some stage a new generation of British people will be able to vote to rejoin the European Union and that the United Kingdom will be able to come back and be at the heart of the European Union where it should be. That may be two or three decades away, but I for one will look forward to being able to welcome it back at some stage in the near future.