Mr. Dennis Godfrey:

I will add a point about the Eames-Bradley report. At the material time, I was a senior official in the Northern Ireland Office when Mr. Peter Hain set up the Eames-Bradley commission and also while Mr. Shaun Woodward was Secretary of State. The report was never formally shelved by the British Government. As the committee knows, the £12,000 payment created a major political firestorm. In an attempt to save the rest of the report, we felt that we had to distance ourselves from the payment. In fact, we made the announcement on the way to a Northern Ireland Affairs Committee meeting on which Dr. Alasdair McDonnell may well have been sitting. Thereafter, the politics of the greater issue of devolving policing and justice took over. In a sense, the report sat there.

There was not a good history of measures being imposed from the centre, particularly in these complex and sensitive issues. Our view was that there needed to be a consensus at a local level. The Deputy is right, in that, while I will not say that no one made an attempt to build a consensus, it simply never emerged. There is a strong sense now that the Eames-Bradley report is back on Dr. Haass's desk in some shape or form. All is not lost. Certainly, all of that work is not lost.