Northern Ireland Dail Éireann — 2026-05-26 ============================================================ Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central I thank all the Deputies for their commentary. Deputy Brendan Smith raised the studies that have been under way by the National Economic and Social Council, NESC, and the ESRI under shared island. There is a range of studies. Never before in the history of the State have we had such a body of research commissioned and completed on the differences between systems in Northern Ireland, be it the health service, education and right across the board, and those in the Republic. There is a very good body of research. The Deputy made a very good suggestion that we would task the NESC with doing a more fundamental economic and social study around the central Border economic corridor. I will bring that idea to the shared island unit and NESC and I will come back to the Deputy on it. It is a positive and constructive idea. There are specific challenges in the area in respect of the regional economic make-up, in terms of farming, food, construction and other areas. We could perhaps design a study for NESC to do on that issue and in that area. I thank Deputy Cormac Devlin for his role as Chair of the Good Friday committee. He is very much engaged in all of these issues and very much informed about them. It is interesting that, if you take those tourism projects, we have increased passenger traffic on the Dublin-Belfast rail line by 40%. The shops and retailers in the North are doing much better now than they would have been doing if the shared island initiative had not invested in the rail service. This investment has made it an hourly service and, vice versa , people are coming to the Republic more and there are greater connections between people, which is very important. Recently, under the shared island initiative I met people from the west of Ireland involved in knitting and other crafts and there were also people from loyalist east Belfast. Some people from both groups had never been to the other part of the island. For some, it was their first time being in Belfast and for others it was their first time being in Dublin. People talk about unity and all of that, but if we do not increase that level of interaction between people so that they can get to know each other a bit better and understand each other, then we are at nothing. The Dublin-Derry PSO air service will be funded by the shared island initiative. The Minister of Transport will bring in that public service obligation air service in October of this year. This will be of great value to Derry in particular because the north west has lacked connectivity. The A5 has been snarled in planning and so on. We will have some more announcements under the shared island initiative for a rail service to the north west but it is not as comprehensive as the Dublin-Belfast line, for example. We have done a lot on tourism. The Narrow Water Bridge will transform Carlingford Lough and the Mourne Mountains. That will be completed late next year and it will be a major, iconic manifestation of the investment from the shared island project and initiative. Deputy Crowe proposed a very interesting idea. He articulated it in a very measured way, unlike other times, but I think he is on to something. I was in France last week and we agreed a project with the French authorities to digitise some Irish archives in France. For example, in Vincennes, there are original letters from Wolfe Tone, including his last letter to the French authorities, asking them to look after his wife and family because he had served the French army in the cause of Ireland. There are also documents relating to Samuel Beckett's role in the French resistance. All of that is in documentation, in French, and sometimes our historians and other interested people do not get access to it. We are going to digitise it and make it available to the public more generally. In terms of Britain, I will follow up on what the Deputy said because he made a very good point. Some of it is artefacts and some of it is archival material. Some of it is online and a lot of people can access it but we could do better in terms of an east-west relationship. Under the UK-Ireland annual summits we now have agreed cultural exchanges. There will be theatrical performances by the Abbey Theatre and others in the UK and vice versa . I take the Deputy's point that there is a lot of stuff buried in archives or storerooms that has not seen the light of day. The real issue is that the Deputy wants access to these artefacts and materials for everybody on the island of Ireland if they are held in Britain. That would be a good first step and then material could be exchanged and sent on loan to various museums and libraries. It is a very good idea and I will pursue it. I assure Deputy Ó Murchú that again I will talk to the authorities about the murder of Seamus Ludlow. I do not have the latest details the Deputy has regarding new witnesses and so forth. --- 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/2026-05-26/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:04+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-26