I welcome the opportunity to deliver a closing statement on this Bill on behalf of the Government. I thank colleagues from all sides of the House for their contributions to today’s discussion. Let me begin by reiterating our shared commitment to unity on this island. For the record, I come from a very strong Fenian and republican tradition. My grandfather on my father’s side, Felix Feehan from Cullyhanna, County Armagh, was a republican. After partition, he ended up running a bakery in Tubbercurry, County Sligo. My grandfather on my mother’s side, James Feely, was the commander of the IRA in north Roscommon. He was imprisoned in the War of Independence and released under the Anglo-Irish Treaty. He subsequently became a Sinn Féin councillor and one of the first gardaí síochána. The Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, signed by the Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, fundamentally changed Anglo-Irish relations by creating a framework that recognised both nationalist and unionist identities. It paved the way for the Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace and prosperity to our island. We remain determined to realise the full potential of the Good Friday Agreement. The enduring peace it has brought to this island still needs to be protected, and the potential it provides for the unity of our people needs to be realised. It is the Government’s view that it will only be realised through focus on and investment in reconciliation. That is why reconciliation is at the heart of the programme for Government. There is no single, one-off act we can do as a Government, Parliament or even as a nation to unify the people of this island. Like anything complex or worth doing, such an endeavour can only be achieved through hard work and patience, honest discussions and people-to-people contact, listening to the sincerely held views of all communities on this island and genuinely cherishing all traditions in their riches and diversity. As the Taoiseach said last week, this requires a hard slog. This is not only Government policy; it is a lesson we have all learned from our history. Too often in our past, it has been easy to be convinced by the righteousness of our beliefs and to fail to properly engage with the views of others. Twenty-eight years after the transformational endorsement of the Good Friday Agreement by the people North and South, we are in a different place, which all of us in this Chamber want to see. We can strive for inclusiveness and a connected island for all communities, where there is room for a wide variety and diversity of views, traditions and identities. This is what is guiding the Government’s current approach, whether through North-South co-operation, our determination to address the legacy of the Troubles, the Government’s reconciliation fund or the shared island initiative. The reconciliation fund has been a flagship programme in the Department of foreign affairs since the 1980s. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, launched a new reconciliation fund strategy in March of this year. The value of our investment through this reconciliation fund to date stands at over €8 million. It was just €2.7 million in 2018. Complementing this work within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is the shared island civic society fund, which has a budget of over €6 million for the 2025-27 period. It funds North-South co-operation and engagement through increased cross-Border civic society activity. More broadly, the shared island initiative, established in 2020, is working and realising the promise of a more connected and reconciled future on this island. It is the most ambitious agenda set out by any Government in the history of the State to promote co-operation and understanding across this island. We are backing it with €2 billion through the shared island fund. These are all examples of real, tangible projects that help bring the people of this island together and to allow people who live on one part of the island to more easily work in another, further enhancing the all-island community. This is real investment in the future. It is also the hard slog. We should not be afraid of it; rather, we should embrace it. We know that patience, persistence and relentless hard work pay off. We saw that in the 1980s with the Anglo-Irish Agreement. We also saw it - some of us lived it – with the Good Friday Agreement in the 1990s. These landmark achievements were built on years, if not decades, of painstaking behind-the-scenes work that rarely makes the headlines. It was never a question of rushing to the finish line; rather, it was a patient cultivation of relationships and connection. That is the work the Government is focused on, and I am very proud to support it this evening.

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