 follow me? The invitation, to come and speak to you and one of the letter from Tom. Making clear that some of your speakers in the past include Mikael Gorbyshoff, Gordon Bryan, Bankie Moon, Christine Lagard. I am fascinated to understand who you are confusing me for, because I am certainly not. ond rydw i'r llunio dychydig ac yn ein fodwn i'r ffordd. Mae'r ddweud ychydig yn ddiddordeb. Fy hwn i'n ddod, rydw i ddod yn ddiddorol i ni. Mae'n ddiddorol yn ystod o adrwymenau i ddiddorol i ddiddorol i gwbl yn y ddiddorol i ffwrdd yma oedden nhw. Mae'n ddiddorol i'r ddiddorol i fynd i'r ddysgu'r gymhreiddau ar gyfer yng Nghymru, I know it takes a bit of imagination these days, but back then, successful enough to represent Ireland at that year's international event which was in Scotland. And although I'm a unionist leader, very proud of my Irishness and I think it feeds into that old John Hewitt sense of I'm an Ulsterman, I'm Irish, British and European, and if you deny any part of that you diminish who I am. And indeed pride Irishman like Edward Carson from Dublin. And a more recent visit to Dublin was earlier this year when we went to the Royal Irish Academy as the Ulster Unionist Party to bring on an event as part of our contribution to the centenary of Easter 1916. And I stand to be corrected because we only thought of it as we were actually setting up our stall on the day, but somebody said, are we the first unionists to actually put on an event in Dublin since the 1920s? And nobody has been able to say you're not, which is quite shocking to me, but also reflects something else that I feel about unionism. And it was very well summarised in a conversation I had in Belfast some years ago with a former American ambassador to Dublin. And when we established that I was not a career politician and that he was not a career diplomat, we decided we would engage in some plain speaking. And his home truth to me was the problem with unionism is that your PR is crap. And I have to say it's very hard to disagree because I think if you look back over the years unionism has not been good at engaging and explaining its position. And if you don't explain your position you can't expect somebody else to do it for you. And there's a little point, for example, over the decades in accusing various American administrations of being green when you've never given them the unionist perspective as the counterpoint. So on that basis I'm very pleased to accept the invitation to be here today. Tom cleverly pinned me down to a title and an abstract and shamelessly I chose my title, the title of our initial document on Brexit. You're probably aware that the First and Deputy First Ministers wrote a letter to Prime Minister May on the 10th of August about Brexit. It identified five areas of concern and of no difficulty with those areas they are, they are valid areas of concern. There were the border, trade and access to labour, energy, EU funding and agri food. The difficulty I have was that was the 10th of August but those issues were as plain on the 5th of April or May or June as they were in August. And they did not go on to offer any solutions, any pathways or any vision. So what we have tried to do in this document is provide a kind of framework made up of three things. A vision for how Northern Ireland might prosper or benefit in a post-Brexit era. The kind of strategy that we need to put in place yesterday to make sure that we benefit out of the negotiations. And then what we call 10 key asks, in other words 10 developments or action points which could be used to measure how successful we have been at the end of those negotiations. So in terms of the vision we look to the border and the whole conversation seems to be negative at the moment and about whether we need gatekeepers and if so how many and in what way. Rather than focusing on the fact that there is a gate and how we keep that gate open to best effect. It is to become a border between the United Kingdom and the European Union, post-Brexit. And that means to my mind Northern Ireland has the opportunity to become the UK's gateway to the European Union. Now I can't tell you in huge detail how that works because we have to know whether we're doing it in the context of access to the single market, whether we're in the customs union or what vision the Prime Minister has for the whole of the United Kingdom beyond Brexit. The second thing was the strategy and here I am astonished to discover that there has been practically no contingency planning by the Northern Ireland Executive. I had to say when I thought about the civil service I thought it could not be that somebody like Sir Malcolm McKibbin would not have done something. And as we were to discover a few weeks ago under a Freedom of Information request he had asked the various departments to contingency plan ahead of the 23rd of June. But the document was never completed and the First Minister claims she never saw it. We subsequently heard that the Department of Agriculture had given lines to people manning their telephone helpline to be used on the 24th of June. But all the lines that were given out to be used in response to queries were predicated on a remain vote. And it was only early on the 24th that somebody started feeding lines that reflected the fact that the UK voted to come out. So there was very very little contingency planning. We need to move on from that and what I believe the Executive needs to do now is in the first instance put together the intellectual capacity and resource to look at the policy options, define what our preferences and priorities are and then critically trying to assess whether those priorities complement the UK's or clash with them. And it seems to me inevitably there will be clashes in priorities and where there are those will be very serious. For example agriculture is a much more important sector to the Northern Ireland economy than agriculture is deemed to be by the London government. So Mrs May and her team made a side in the fullness of time. It's a really good idea to do some sort of trade deal for South American beef. As I understand it South America can produce quality beef. They can do it with welfare guarantees of a reasonable standard to satisfy most people in the United Kingdom. And they can do it at about 40% less cost than people are paying at the moment. So on that basis Mrs May made the side that's a really good deal but it could wipe out our beef sector and not just Northern Ireland. It could do tremendous damage to yours and we've already seen what's happened to mushroom farmers here in the Republic of Ireland. So knowing when the priorities clash is absolutely critical but we haven't even identified the priorities in any great detail at the moment. And the intellectual capacity exists but it's not in the right place. It's not up the hill at Stormwood Castle or indeed in Parliament buildings. It's in gatherings like this on both sides of the border. And I have a fear that the two big parties of the executive of Northern Ireland instinctively like to hold par very very close. And will not consult in an open way as I would like to say to other people you probably know things that we don't. So you tell us and we will use that knowledge to inform our strategy going forward on these issues. About three weeks ago David Sterling, Permanent Secretary of the Department of Finance stood in for Malcolm McKibben in coming to the committee of the Executive Office to talk about what was happening behind the scenes. And as part of his evidence he said when the Chancellor announced initially that any application for EU funding that was signed off by the autumn statement was guaranteed. They had done a risk assessment and determined that around one billion euro of Northern Ireland applications for EU funding were at risk. And then when Philip Hammond went to his Conservative Party conference and said to tell you what we're going to be a bit more generous. The risk dropped from a billion euro to under 100 million euro. More than a 90% swing in one sentence of one speech. My concern is that we are not monitoring in a live sense these developments because the next sentence and the next speech may be equally dramatic but it may be the opposite of what Mr Hammond did. It could be as bad as that was good for us. Are we able to monitor that in lifetime and then do we have the communication channels to say to the right people, hey that's disastrous for us. And that's not just a matter of having a communications channel from Belfast to London. We also need a communication channel from Belfast to Dublin because of the remaining EU members. Nobody is in any doubt that Ireland will be our best friends and potentially our biggest advocates and they'll be on the other side of the negotiating table. So it is absolutely critical I think that our executive engages. And you may be looking at me and saying yeah but you didn't bother coming down two days ago for the big conversation. Well there were reasons for that and I would just assure you that yesterday I sat with a delegation of Ulster Unionists and greeted Antishoch and Charlie Flanagan, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. We had a very good initial discussion. I'm not sure they were entirely aware that we'd already committed initial thoughts in some detail in this document but they took it away. And we will continue that dialogue in the coming weeks and months because we recognise the mutual interest in trying to identify the threats to mitigate them and trying to find and then maximise any opportunities that exist. In terms of the third thing that the ten asks, if there is all this money, these billions of sterling being repatriated then I think Northern Ireland needs to use this moment as an opportunity to say we have changed our political thinking. We are no longer coming to you with the begging bowl because we've run out of cash for welfare or for this or for that. But actually we're taking a longer term strategic view of how do we make Northern Ireland a much more attractive proposition for investors, indigenous and foreign direct because we want to be less dependent. Some politicians in Northern Ireland seem to be very comfortable with the fact that we're dependent to the tune of about 10 billion sterling per annum. I am not. I would like us to aspire to be where we were 100 years ago when that corner of Ireland was basically a net contributor to the Treasury. We won't get back there because we've got a health service and we've got state pensions but the aspiration, the effort would be transformational in our society. So rather than take a begging bowl approach because we've got short term monetary cash flow problems, what I would like us to do is to pitch for two things out of the ten particularly which would transform us as an economy. One is infrastructure and the other is a step change in skills. If you look at our infrastructure it's not good. You used European money for infrastructure we tended not to. And within infrastructure as well as the roads and all the rest our biggest concern is energy. Not just the cost and we are I think the second highest for energy costs in Western Europe but supply, the security of supply is in great danger. To the point where it is not sensational to say that some residents of Northern Ireland could celebrate our centenary in 2021 by candlelight, we are getting to the stage where there is an existential threat to the supply across the whole of Northern Ireland. So infrastructure is critical and skills also just yesterday I was talking to the son of one of our most successful entrepreneurs who is now selling out and looking like he's going to be a very successful entrepreneur in his own right. It's an engineering company about 10-12 miles out of Belfast and yet in terms of his complement of engineers, the one who's closest to Belfast is from Poland, the rest are from even further east in Europe. So there is a terrible mismatch between skills and education and what the labour market is looking for. So we need to look at all these issues. They say there's 10 asks, I'll not rehearse all of them. The other big economic one is to take Northern Ireland and turn it into an enterprise zone. And if you look internationally at things like rates relief and any incentives to reinvest, there are actions, clear actions you can take. Whether they would work in the Northern Ireland context again depends on what Mrs May wants out of the negotiations. Because if we're in the single market and we've got the four freedoms, then that means certain things cannot be done because there'll be state aid. But if we're not in the European single market, if we're not in the customs union, then other things may be possible. Working with the Dublin Government, I think is critical because if we only go for the one channel into London, we're closing off very valuable communications channels and we're not maximising our friendship with yourselves here in the Irish Republic. So my final thought is I'm a little concerned that the two parties of the executive are going to drive this now and try and exclude the parties of opposition. And I don't think that's a good idea because this is more important than anything we have faced since the abolition was restored in 1998. And the parties of opposition have the same problem as the parties of the Northern Ireland Executive, one for one against leaving the European Union. And I think having the four heads thinking through these issues is probably better than just having the two. But those are kind of my initial thoughts and I'm more than happy to listen to your questions and your comments and thank you for listening. Thank you.