Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the Leas-Chathaoirleach on her appointment. Although I had no hand, act or part in it, nothing gives me greater pleasure than to see her where she is at the moment.

I welcome the Minister as a colleague and a friend, and as a person in whom I have the greatest confidence that his period as Minister will be effective and carried out with tremendous skill, and also that he will bring the public with him in the difficult task he has.

As he said, this particular motion has no downside. We are simply giving Ireland the right to be in on the negotiation process for a scheme which, depending on its content, we largely have for ourselves in any event. There are a number of points that I want to make. As Senator Boyhan just said, the almost allergic reaction of the British establishment to facilitating young people moving across from the European Union countries to the United Kingdom is very difficult to understand. If they really thought that every other country in Europe had the same approach to their young people coming to experience life in Spain, France, Germany or elsewhere, and if they heard people in their parliaments saying that this was absolutely unacceptable, they would pause and think why is this so. It is the migration issue into England that caused so much difficulty for the Tories, when they were in office, and still causes, to an extent, for the Starmer Labour Government.

I have no doubt that attitudes are changing in the United Kingdom. We live in a Trump-Vance world now and it is very difficult to work out precisely how the pressures and policies exerted from America are going to reflect the EU-UK relationship, and how the rise of the Reform Party in Britain is going to change attitudes in the United Kingdom and tie down the Labour Party to a position of conservatism on the subject of youth mobility. On the other hand, if we look at the current situation, opinion poll after opinion poll shows that 58% of voters in the United Kingdom believe that Brexit was a mistake. Working back from that, we cannot say that Brexit is going to be reversed in the foreseeable future. Even the Liberal Democrats, who favour that, are afraid to actually articulate it for want of being described as betrayers of the Brexit referendum. However, I have no doubt that attitudes are changing. The particular thing about attitudes in the United Kingdom towards Brexit is that it is the younger generation that is, in retrospect, the most hostile to the whole Brexit enterprise. I think they instinctively feel it was a mistake to cut themselves off from the European Union.

The Minister mentioned attending a Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting and feeling the absence of the UK Ministers there. That is a view I very much endorse and share with him. Many is the time that I was there and I saw that Ireland and the United Kingdom had a unique view which we shared and implemented. We had a number of advantages. We had the advantage that a lot of research was done by the civil service in Britain, which was of huge assistance to us in articulating our points of view. I once attended a committee of the House of Lords to be examined on the issue of certain opt-ins in regard to Schengen matters, and it was like going into an oral examination in Oxford or Cambridge. These peers really knew their stuff and I was lucky to escape without letting myself down intellectually, such was the standard of their analysis. The point I am making is that we are at a loss in Europe due to the absence of the United Kingdom.

The Minister mentioned the particular topic that inspired that reflection on his part, which was admissibility of evidence in certain matters. That brings me to one point that I want to make without complicating this evening’s debate. If there is such a proposal there, nobody in these Houses except the Minister knows about it. I am just making that point. Nobody knows what they are cooking up next and the reason we do not know what they are cooking up in Europe is that this House and the other House - the Houses of the Oireachtas - have not properly engaged with the whole European legislative process. Our committees really are not keeping an eye on what is coming down the tracks. They are not analysing what is happening at a European level.They are not doing what used to happen in Britain, where, if there was a proposal for a particular measure, the Home Office would obtain research by British academics as to the implications of the particular proposal. We are not doing any of that. None of that is happening in Ireland. We do not have a mature relationship with the European legislative process. I wish the Minister well, but I reiterate the point that until he mentioned it here today, I had never heard of this proposal. As far as I know, nobody else in these Houses had ever heard of it either.

When I held the Minster's position, we had a briefing session for the justice committee. It was an innovation, prior to going to a Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting, to discuss the upcoming agenda with the justice committee. I prepared greatly for those meetings. If, say, drugs were on the agenda, we just had a discussion on the drugs problems in Dublin. There was no interest from the committee about what was being discussed at the EU level.

The possibility of working is mentioned. I do not know how that will go down with either the Labour Party or the Tories in England. We must be careful, and recent events probably reinforce this view, about language schools offering educational courses but people really using them as a licence to work in Ireland and hold a job with, for example, Deliveroo. There are many jobs which, to be honest, Irish people will not do. We should not be naive, however. Student working rights, such as Irish students had under J1 visa arrangements in America, cause problems for the British Government.

With those few reflections, I welcome the Minister and thank him for his kind remarks about the Seanad. I wish him well in the next five years.