Cross-Border Co-operation
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-29
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Simon Harris (FG), Wicklow

The Parades Commission got this extraordinarily wrong. I am very clear on that. There has been good engagement with the Deputy's party leader and with Michelle O'Neill in her capacity as party vice president. To be fair to everybody, the Taoiseach is extraordinarily engaged on this issue; of that there is absolutely no doubt. My colleague, the Minister for foreign affairs, is in the North this evening. We are engaging closely with the Deputy's party colleagues.
I, too, had the opportunity to meet the Garvaghy Road residents when they were here last week. What really struck me was that they are decent people who all have simply worked far too hard for far too long to ever go back to the situation of the past. The Deputy will know this, because she has been up there with the community, but they told me of the young people who had grown up expecting this conflict to be just a distant memory. We are never going back and we cannot go back.
The most important thing in the here and now is that space be created. I do not want to say anything to cut across that process other than that we are, and will remain, very engaged as a Government and as co-guarantors of a peace agreement that so many people have worked so hard to get to this point. I heard a woman speaking on "Morning Ireland" this morning who is a Garvaghy Road resident. She talked about how her children were growing up playing with children from another community tradition in a way that would not have been imaginable in the past. Even if this issue ended today, and we all hope it does, there is a level of trauma and retraumatisation that is real after the events of the past few days. We will all have to work together on that in the time ahead.
We continue to work together in a sensible, all-island way to resolve the taxation issue for the future. There are very practical implications for people, regardless of their political tradition. We can do much better for cross-Border workers and I am determined to bring the matter to a close.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-29