Oireachtas delegation urges British ministers to visit Border

A cross-party Oireachtas delegation has called on senior British ministers to visit the Border within the next few weeks as Brexit negotiations on the issue intensify.

The delegation from the Joint Committee on European Union Affairs and the Seanad Brexit committee was in London for two days of meetings at Westminster.

Fine Gael Senator Neale Richmond told Brexit minister Suella Fernandes that she and Brexit secretary David Davis should view the reality of the Border at first hand.

“It is the clear aim and preference of the European side that a very close trade and customs partnership is the best way to ensuring that there is no return to a hard border, although some in the UK still maintain there are technical solutions to this.

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“Given that minister Fernandes has yet to visit the Irish Border and secretary Davis has not visited the Border since 2016, I used our meeting to invite them to visit the Border region and see first-hand the difficulties that lie in either imposing technical solutions or returning to a hard border,” he said.

During other meetings the delegation, which included EU Affairs Committee chairman Michael Healy-Rae and Senators from a number of parties, expressed the hope that prime minister Theresa May and foreign secretary Boris Johnson would also visit the Border.

Mr Richmond pointed out that EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier had visited the region twice, as have MEPs Manfred Weber and Guy Verhofstadt, the French European minister and many other European political delegations.

During their two-day visit to London, the delegation also met cabinet office secretary David Lidington, Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer and members of a number of parliamentary committees.

“It gave us a great opportunity to press the Irish case within the UK once again and we were surprised at how impactful our contributions were. We probably expected to learn more but we ended up imparting a lot more information than we thought we’d be required to,” Mr Richmond said.