Mr. Michael D'Arcy:

It is good to speak again to Dr. Farry. I was wearing my political scientist hat but now I am going to wear my historian's hat. Mr. Farry's observation about the meetings of the NSMC that he went to is very pertinent. It goes back to my point that the first line of strand two refers to the totality of relationships. There was a sense that while a lot of thought and effort were put in, during the build-up to the agreement, around encompassing the totality of the economic relationship and the potential for economies of scale regarding proximity and mutually beneficial conditions, it got narrowed down too quickly in the operation of the NSMC to particular projects that we could agree on doing and for which there was money to proceed. Then there was a sense of just sticking to those ones that had been left in the text following the negotiations and not all those that had been agreed, as certain people have reminded us, in the original UK–Ireland Government framework document, which I know was based on solid research done by a whole range of legitimate entities, including the University of Ulster and the ESRI, and myself and others at the time. They were not just plucked out of thin air; they were really solid, beneficial things that would have made a real difference over the past 20 years.

Speaking to Dr. Farry in his MLA hat, I believe one of the things missing for me has been awareness in the Northern Ireland Assembly generally of the all-island dimension of devolved responsibilities and the question of where we take a decision in a devolved area that actually has an impact on the all-island economy that is detrimental to the well-being of Northern Ireland. There is very little thinking in that frame when it comes to looking at the broader picture. The response to the question should be used as a criterion to make a judgment call about individual obstacles and projects and opportunities.

If I look at the programmes for Government, I note it always seems to have been the Irish Government that had to bring the North–South dimension into play. There did not necessarily seem to be a sense in the Assembly itself, in committees and across the board, of how the all-island-economy dimension mattered to the areas of direct responsibility for Northern Ireland itself. Now we have the scale of the all-island economy quantified and research telling us a lot more about our interconnectivity. Again, I come back to energy as being the area regarding which most ordinary consumers will have the most immediate connectivity. The most important neglected area is the role of the EU dimension. To come back to the Windsor Framework and its focus on Great Britain and Northern Ireland over the past few years, everyone is neglecting the connectivity of Belfast to Brussels via Dublin, which is essentially through the NSMC. This was an area never considered when the NSMC was agreed, as we know. Does the NSMC still have a joint secretariat? What is the position on the cross-Border bodies, which are both mentioned as entities that can bring the specific issues Dr. Farry referred to as obstacles to the attention of the joint committee? Is it automatically the case that, in the absence of the Executive, the joint secretariat could not be a facilitator in this regard and involve business and other interests in engaging the democratic route of consultation to inject Northern Ireland's views, interests and concerns into the decision-making process around the framework in Brussels?

I heard Mark Durkan and others in a previous session, when they were giving lessons, talking about innovation around the agreement. There is real potential there but it needs someone to start talking about it within that schematic, as was said, where individual issues can then be placed, rather than just being plucked out one by one and we almost have to reinvent the wheel for every one of them. Certainly, for business, investment and an organisation such as IBEC across 35 sectors, it would be very useful to have a schematic by which each of the sectors here and their engagement in the all-island economy could, in a way, be a starting point as a route into policymaking and decision-making in both jurisdictions. It is about whether strand two and the North-South Ministerial Council, NSMC, provide a co-ordinating framework within that and a support to that process.