The current financial crisis created “new opportunities” to enhance North-South economic cooperation, a conference at University College Dublin was told today.
“This is precisely the right moment to break new ground,” said Social Democratic and Labour Party activist Michelle Byrne.
Entitled The Agreement Generation: An Opportunity for Change?, the one-day conference was held in the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at UCD.
A range of speakers focused on the hopes and aspirations of the generation which had come to maturity in the period since the Agreement was concluded on Good Friday 1998.
Richard Bullick of the Democratic Unionist Party, Special Adviser to Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson, spoke of the changes that had occurred since the agreement on Good Friday 1998. He said these were reflected in the fact that he was sitting on a panel with such a wide range of other parties but also that the DUP was part of government in Northern Ireland with Sinn Féin and there was constructive engagement between the two parts of the island.
Ulster Unionist Party member Kenny Donaldson described the experience of being one of the few unionists living in the area around Crossmaglen, Co Armagh.
Sinn Féin Belfast City Cllr Conor Maskey challenged republican dissidents to run for election and said he would welcome the opportunity to have a debate with them on a republican-to-republican basis.
Lorcan Price, former chair of Ogra Fianna Fail, said the youth organisation had encouraged the wider party to take a more active approach to North-South cooperation and he welcomed the successful establishment of Fianna Fáil branches in third-level institutes in the North.
Fine Gael activist John Carroll, parliamentary assistant to Deputy Leo Varadkar, stressed that the mutual economic benefits should be the main motivating factor in North-South cooperation policies.
Labour Party activist Hazel Nolan said the communities in Northern Ireland had more in common with one another than with communities on the other side of the Border or in the rest of the UK, and the future lay in mutual cooperation.
Other participants included former deputy speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Jane Morrice; Dr Laura McAttackney from the John Hume Institute; former Joint Secretary of the North South Ministerial Council, Tim O’Connor; Director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies and Secretary of Universities Ireland, Andy Pollak; and Orlaith McBride of the Arts Council.