The Government should allow Northern Ireland's politicians to be represented at high-level EU negotiations by giving them formal access to Irish delegations, a former European commissioner, Mr Michael O'Kennedy, has said.
This could eventually lead to their having a shared role with the Republic in all EU negotiations affecting the North, he told the McGill Summer School in Co Donegal last night.
If such a right were offered to unionists, he said, "it is unthinkable that they would willingly and deliberately deprive themselves of the exercise of that right".
Mr O'Kennedy was speaking after announcing he was seeking Fianna Fail's nomination to contest the Presidency, should an election take place. If elected, he said, he would work "to advance the cause of harmony and reconciliation amongst all of the people of Ireland of whatever tradition and background".
He said the people of Northern Ireland were unique in Europe in being deprived of any meaningful or influential role in the EU.
"Their elected representatives, in sharp contrast with their counterparts in the Republic, have no role and no place at the Council of Ministers or at the European Council. The United Kingdom government has never nominated a commissioner from Northern Ireland while the other regions of the United Kingdom, namely Scotland and Wales, have been so represented."
Northern Ireland was also effectively excluded from representation at the highest level on the European Court of Justice and the other significant institutions of the EU, he said. "It is fair to say that the major discrimination affecting Northern Ireland at this point is in the vital area of international relationships where it has no direct voice either at the European Union or the United Nations . . . It is time to end this discrimination against Northern Ireland representatives."
The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 was the cause of this discrimination, he said. It made no provision for separate representation of Northern Ireland's interests in any international forum. The Constitution of Ireland, on the other hand, placed particular emphasis on Ireland's international relations.
He said there were many areas of vital interest such as agriculture, fisheries, tourism and region al development where the interests of Northern Ireland were "much more closely aligned with those of the Republic than with the rest of the United Kingdom". For this reason, the Government should offer to fill "this discriminatory vacuum" as soon as possible.
While divisions in Northern Ireland ran deep and had been reinforced by decades of conflict, "it has to be noted that prior to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the divisions in Europe were even deeper and were reinforced by conflicts more bloody that anything experienced in British-Irish or North-South relationships over the years."
The initiative taken by the EU's founding fathers in devising institutions and policies to accommodate differences and eradicate divisions could be used as a precedent to accommodate differences in Northern Ireland, he said.