Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank all Senators for their contributions which, in some cases, were questions. I will try to move through those questions as best I can.

I will deal first with Senator Mullen's comments. He rightly asked questions that some might, perhaps, think are unpalatable and so on. I will try to answer some of the issues. As the person representing him and the Irish Government, I have tried to be very careful never to allow my language slip into a language that is seen as anti-British. It is against everything I stand for, to be honest. In many ways, my own story and upbringing is one of hundreds of thousands of examples of British influence on Ireland and vice versain terms of my own family story, education and so on. I am not anti-British. At the same time, I have a responsibility to protect our country, to ensure that a negotiation that took years to conclude is respected and that efforts to effectively unwind and undermine previous agreements, which were essentially designed to protect a peace process in Ireland, are responded to with honesty.

It was a very difficult thing to do to find agreement on how one deals with the so-called Irish question when it comes to Brexit. A majority of people across the United Kingdom as a whole, including Northern Ireland, voted to leave the European Union. We did not like that result, but we have respected it. That does not mean that there are not many people in Northern Ireland, a majority of whom did not vote for Brexit, that have their everyday lives impacted by a stability that has been in place since the Good Friday Agreement and institutions that are associated with it. A large part of that stability has been an all-Ireland economy where relationships are built through trade and an absence of barriers, borders and checkpoints. We have fought hard to ensure that that legitimate political and social concern has been fully understood across the EU and we have built a solidarity around that message. The former UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, understood that only too well and she tried to design a solution for the so-called question dealing with Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in a way that could protect a peace process, prevent Border infrastructure and at the same time ensure that trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland could continue as well.

To raise the issue now and say that we have to understand the unionists' perspective with the protocol and the problems that they have with it, these are issues that have been discussed for years. The compromise, which was rejected by some in unionism, was the backstop which did not create any difference of treatment between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. It was rejected and replaced by the protocol, which was a concept that emanated out of London, not Brussels, in terms of a Boris Johnson prime ministry, to be fair to him, looking to solve the Irish question, but different from his predecessor, Theresa May. That solution proposed that Northern Ireland effectively have a special solution applied to it recognising its unique status within the United Kingdom but also very connected to the rest of the island of Ireland from a trade perspective and the need to prevent those barriers and borders developing. It is not fair to now say that the protocol is not a legitimate way of dealing with this because there is a perspective that is uncomfortable with it. That perspective was there and many on the other side of the debate, the nationalist side, also had to make significant compromises. They are Irish people who have been taken out of the European Union and they have had to accept that.