Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat, a Chathaoirligh. Some days ago I had the pleasure of coming in here to welcome the Windsor agreement, and to appeal to the Democratic Unionist Party, DUP, and, very importantly, the business community and civic society in Ulster to embrace the agreement and maybe impress upon the DUP leadership the importance of accepting it. As a Border person, I reiterate that plea to civic society in Northern Ireland, to the business community and to all people there to put pressure on to get the Windsor agreement accepted and to re-establish power sharing.

Recently, when speaking on the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, I brought up the question of practical things that could be done that could advance a unity of hearts and minds on the island. I mentioned that in various grant aids, such as the sports capital grants and various community grants, extra points could be given in the evaluation of the application, or rather positive discrimination could be shown to applications which show evidence of going up North and bringing people down from Northern Ireland, or which were creating that link.

I ask the Deputy Leader that we have a debate on this question, a debate purely focused on strategies that we, as a country, could employ to bring about unity on the island. Obviously, the whole question of the special unit in the Taoiseach's office comes into play there, but there might be exercises that we could do, like exchanges between schools, or educational, cultural or sporting exchanges, to build up that trust and interaction between people. The great difficulty on the island is the degree to which the entire Republic is Dublin-centric and that we do not have enough people travelling North, looking North, shopping North, visiting North, etc.

I hope the Deputy Leader - and I notice her nodding in approval - will embrace this and have a debate around it. I would love to participate in such a debate. The focus of the debate would not be to set out aspirations, but rather that we go through practical steps that could be taken in the next few months. We will never achieve Irish unity on aspirations unless we build these bridges.