Departmental Programmes
Dail Éireann — 2023-10-04
============================================================

Bernard Durkan (FG), Kildare North

I wish to express my strong commitment and support for the points raised by my colleague, Deputy Brendan Smith, who is from a good Ulster county. It is important to remember to try to maximise the shared island concept with a view to ensuring it is part and parcel of the Good Friday Agreement. There is a need to ensure that the aspirations of the Good Friday Agreement continue to remain within the vision and that the benefits accruing from both it and the shared island initiative and their potential remain to the fore. No one or no opinion must be excluded. Given the roles of the Irish and British Governments, nobody must be excluded from the discussion. There must be no perceived threat or actual threat to the Good Friday Agreement or to the interests of either community in Northern Ireland.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-10-04/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:14+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-10-04