Ireland is in my blood. My mother was born in the flat above her grandmother's hardware shop in the main street of Ballyshannon in Donegal. She lived there as a child, started school there and only moved when her father died, her mother remarried and they crossed the water to Glasgow. But I still spent virtually every childhood summer holiday, up to when the troubles really took hold, usually at Rosnowlagh. It was there in the seas off the Irish coast that I learned to swim and my father took me to my first pub, a remote little house in the country, for a Guinness, a taste I have never forgotten and which is always a pleasure to repeat.
Even now in my constituency of Sedgefield, which at one time had 30 pits or more, all now gone, virtually every community remembers that its roots lie in Irish migration to the mines of Britain. When we look around other parts of Britain, we see the influence of the Irish people in almost every facet of British life. We have a shared history, some of it painful, but by the same token some of it good. So like it or not, the British and the Irish are irredeemably linked.