This week my work has focused a lot on borders.
On Tuesday I worked with MPs from other parties to consider how Mutual Enforcement could help provide a long-term solution to remove the Irish Sea border.
Then on Wednesday I was giving evidence to a Westminster Committee where I was reminding MPs that nationalists would never have accepted the kind of border infrastructure between Monaghan and Aughnacloy that is envisaged between Larne and Cairnryan.
Finally on Thursday I travelled to Dublin where I was the guest speaker at a Corporation Ireland event where I reminded the audience that unionists don’t fear cooperation with our neighbours in the Republic of Ireland on matters of mutual interest.
Indeed, I urged them to lift their eyes beyond this current challenge and debate what the relationship should deliver over the next 25 years. When we get the NI Protocol replaced with arrangements that unionists can support, there needs to be joined up thinking across the British Isles on a range of economic issues.
Ultimately whether in Westminster, Belfast or Dublin my message was consistent. Progress can only be made in Northern Ireland when there is consensus. Trying to foist a solution upon Northern Ireland without the support of unionists will never work.
Indeed, for all the people in London, Dublin, Washington, and Brussels who have hailed 25 years of the Belfast Agreement and the Agreements flowing from it, the fundamental ingredient is and was moving forward together.
Therefore, the next 25 years will only lead to better and more prosperous times throughout these islands if there is respect North, South, East and West. Those with a British identity, those with an Irish identity and those somewhere in-between must be respected. The idea that one section will dominate the other or ride roughshod over the view of the other is not the path to peace or prosperity.
That means walking in each other’s shoes. I would never have asked the Government or Brussels to build border posts at the RoI / NI border. Of course, that’s where there already is a currency border, health service border, education border and taxation border but I have too much respect for my nationalist neighbours to ask them to start building border posts there.
Sadly, there wasn’t the same level of respect reciprocated towards unionists.
No nationalist with a scintilla of honesty can be surprised that unionists baulked at the idea of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.
Sadly, some viewed the NI Protocol through their border poll advancing spectacles rather than the 20:20 vision of what is best for peace and prosperity in Northern Ireland.