I move:
That Dáil Éireann welcomes the report of the Economic and Social Committee of the European Communities on a development plan for the Irish Border areas, and calls on the Government to take all the necessary steps to ensure its early and successful implementation.
We welcome this report. I met the group involved when I was Minister for Foreign Affairs. Naturally there is a general welcome in the House for this report because we have at last seen the end result of the committees's deliberations. I am not going into detail but the committee set out to ascertain what the Community could do to assist the areas in question which, being amongst the least economically and socially developed in Europe, have the additional disadvantage of being cut in half by a frontier that hampers normal economic development. It is a fact that this area needs special help and I am glad the committee are recommending that a sum of IR£125 million will be made available from EEC funds to get this scheme under way.
At the outset I want to say that I welcome that move but I know the difficulties that are still ahead because this report has to go to the Commission for approval. If there is a sum of £125 million to be given to implement this plan, I ask the Minister for Finance to ensure that all the money be spent implementing the plan and that none of it will be siphoned off, or that not too much will be lost through administrative costs or anything else. There is a general belief that whatever funds are coming to us from whatever scheme, so much is lost along the way that by the time it filters to the ground the benefits expected never materialise.
I am also happy with this report because it confirms that there has to be cross-Border co-operation. Unless we have that cross-Border co-operation we may scrap this report. It is my belief that it is the intention of the people governing this part of the country to provide the co-operation necessary and essential for the implementation of this plan and for many other reasons, but I am very sceptical, worried and gravely concerned that the Northern Ireland administration and the United Kingdom authorities will not give the co-operation required to ensure that this plan can be implemented successfully for the benefit of the people in these disadvantaged areas.
There has been strong evidence of this in recent times. Only last week more roads were closed. This is not the way to show that there is co-operation between the two communities, that they can exist and help each other. Unless there is a change of attitude by the Northern Ireland Office and the British authorities this scheme will never get off the ground. There is a very serious obligation on our Government to ensure that there is that change in attitude which is essential not just for this plan but for normal everyday living between the two parts of this country.
Experience must have shown everybody that the blocking of roads does not lessen the dangers of terrorism as we know it. On a number of occasions as Minister for Justice and Minister for Foreign Affairs I took the opportunity to explain to those United Kingdom Government representatives the foolhardiness of their idealism in believing that by placing a barrier across the road they will prevent terrorism. This has never worked, as has been proved in the past. I am amazed that the thinking of the British Government at the present time is that this will work.
I expected the Minister for Foreign Affairs to be here tonight but I hope the Minister for Finance will convey to him my belief that he has been sadly lacking in his departmental responsibilities because he was not aware of what was going on, or if he was, that he did nothing about it. I have read reports of different statements made by the Minister for Foreign Affairs. In a private briefing to the political correspondents, as quoted in The Irish Times, 18 February, he said he was aware a review was taking place but he only communicated with Mr. Prior, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, on the day the roads were being blocked. Yet the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Barry, was aware for a considerable time of time — his phrase — that this review was taking place and he did nothing about it.
On a number of occasions in this House we discussed meetings that took place, some impromptu, some totally accidental, mar ea, between our Minister for Foreign Affairs and Mr. Prior, particularly the meeting in Brussels where they had a lengthy unscheduled meeting. I would like to know why our Minister did not take advantage of these many meetings to discuss this problem. It is a little late in the day to expect that a letter which would be delivered on Mr. Prior's desk the day the roads were being blocked would have any effect. There was another meeting between the Minister for Justice and the Minister of State for Northern Ireland — a new concept, one of which I do not entirely approve but I will deal with that on another occasion because I doubt I will have the time to do it tonight — but I wonder why there was not a discussion on road closures and potential road closures at that meeting which was called for the sole purpose of discussing security. If there was such a discussion, why was not our Minister for Justice able to convince Mr. Prior that it was a foolhardy exercise on his part to believe that he would lessen the dangers of terrorism and that he would have a safer community by closing roads when experience showed that the only effect it had was pushing the population further from those whose job it is to maintain law and order?
It was very bad form on the part of Mr. Prior not to consult with the Minister for Foreign Affairs specifically, and this is something I would be extremely worried about. There is one thing — and I am not blaming the Minister altogether for this — but the Department of Foreign Affairs knew this review was going on and I am sure the Department of Justice knew too. Why then were the Ministers not alerted to what was involved in the review of this type of arrangement? If the Ministers were not alerted we would like to know, but if they were alerted and did nothing until it was too late, then we have got ourselves into a very serious mess.
I resent the fact that a member of this Government went hiding behind the coat of an unnamed Garda local chief in the division concerned. He said the garda had agreed to it but the following day there was a denial, an unofficial denial, by the Garda authorities that they were consulted or gave permission for these roads to be closed. There has been a big slip-up here. There has been an effort to try to cover it up, which is one we must expose for what it is. A bad mistake was made. The Department of Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Foreign Affairs knew this review was taking place and did nothing about it. The Minister for Foreign Affairs had many meetings with Mr. Prior. We were told all about it here, in fact chided that they had more meetings than we had. That is fine, but I would like to know why he did not avail of the opportunity to express our total objection to any more closing of roads.
I should also like to know why the Minister for Justice, who had this very special meeting to discuss security matters, did not even know what Mr. Prior had planned or, if he did, he did nothing about it. Having done nothing about it, one must pose the question: was he prepared to go along with it, or is it only now that he has become aware of it?
I might read the following quotation from an article entitled "British army may block more roads near the border" which appeared in The Irish Press of Thursday, February 16 1984:
The NIO yesterday admitted there had been contact between police and at political level on both sides of the border, but their statement indicated that these contacts had taken place when the "application from the security forces to the Secretary of State" for the closure of the roads had been made. The statement added there had been discussions "in the normal way with Irish authorities at police and at political levels".
If that is so, then the Minister for Foreign Affairs is not giving us the full story; and, if the Minister for Foreign Affairs is giving us the full story, then the Northern Ireland Office are deliberately misleading us. There is the following interesting extract from the same article:
Rev. Ivan Foster, DUP Assembly man, claimed yesterday that work began on Tuesday but was stopped, as he understood it, following a phone call to the NIO by an Irish Government representative. Mr. Foster claimed that he made a telephone call to the NIO after which an order was given for work to be resumed.
It is worth commenting on that. It is my belief that Mr. Prior is playing politics with security, playing politics at the insistence of certain personnel in the Assembly in Northern Ireland. We have on many occasions pointed out that we believe the Northern Ireland Assembly will never work. We pointed that out from the very beginning when it was not popular to do so, but we have been proven right as of now. The Northern Ireland Assembly is not working. It appears to me that Mr. Prior is deliberately playing footsie with the security situation in an effort to placate those who still attend the Assembly forum.
The report we have here this evening of the Economic and Social Committee of the European Communities on a development plan for the Irish Border areas can be implemented successfully only if there is this co-operation that must exist right across the board. I know for a fact that Mr. Prior is afraid to take a political decision to re-open some of the roads that have been closed for a long time. I remember personally raising with him the opening of a road, national primary road, No. 3, which runs from Dublin to Enniskillen where it is blocked at Aghalane Bridge. If Mr. Prior and those responsible for security in Northern Ireland have not sufficient faith or at this stage are not convinced that the Irish security forces are doing their very best and successfully doing a very difficult job in trying to contain the subversives, trying to maintain law and order and security, then Mr. Prior is really doing harm to their input, which is a very great one, by saying that roads will be closed.
I do not know whether the Minister for Finance, who is present, was up as early as I was this morning. I was listening to Mr. Prior on the radio before 7 o'clock, when he was played live to us on a tape from a function he attended in London last evening. At this function he addressed over 100 businessmen from Northern Ireland and claimed that their job was to sell the financial stability of investment in Northern Ireland to industrialists in the United Kingdom. In an effort to boost Northern Ireland Mr. Prior said that they had 27 subsidiaries of USA companies in Northern Ireland but that it was unfortunate that much of the United Kingdom investment in Ireland was in the southern part of Ireland. He went on to say: "Mind you, they have many problems down there; God knows, they have many problems down there," which was a deliberate effort on his part to try to prevent United Kingdom investment in this part of the country. I would suggest to the Minister, in the interests of the Government, in the interests of the industrial promotional agencies we have, indeed in the interests of fair play, that Mr. Prior should not be allowed get away with that sort of snide remark. If we are to co-operate — and this development plan can be successfully implemented only if we do co-operate — then it is wrong for Mr. Prior to behave the way he is. I contend he is playing narrow politics with security by way of closing these roads for the purpose of trying to maintain existing support, which he has at a very limited level only, within the Northern Ireland Assembly.
We all want to see the contents of this report implemented. I hope its costs will be finally cleared by the EEC and that it will get under way. But that can be done only if there is proper, mutual understanding and co-operation between the two communities on this island.