Mr. Peter Bunting:

I will answer as quickly as I can and Mr. McFeely might wish to add something. There are a number of reasons as to why the agreement has not been implemented. There is a view in the POA, which is probably a hangover from the days of Long Kesh, that they are not going back there. However, anybody who has visited Roe House will know that it is nothing like the Long Kesh prison. As Mr. Finucane said, it is a prison within a prison. I cannot see a loosening up of the regulations. It is a terribly congested space in many ways with turnstiles everywhere. It is a phenomenal place. I believe there has been interference in the sense that in our view the then Minister of Justice was probably beholden to the likes of, for example, the DUP for his position. That probably resulted in him lacking the resolve to tackle this matter head on, despite the fact that we had reached agreement with what we believed to be representatives of the British and Irish Governments and others.

On the NIO, it has never really given us positive evidence or reasoning other than to say, "You do not know what we know and we cannot tell you". One example was given by Mr. McFeely when he was talking about the person incarcerated in isolation for five years. The reasoning in respect of that prisoner was that there was a threat to his life by some people in Roe House. However, when he got out on bail and was walking around the streets of Northern Ireland, nothing ever happened to him. He was never harmed. As such, who was threatening his life? Was it an excuse and a way to punish someone? It is alleged that at that time he was taken out of the prison on two occasions, perhaps by agents of MI5, and taken to Lisburn police station and questioned with a view to turning him over to be an informer. These people, whoever they were, had the power to take him out of that prison and lodge him in Lisburn PSNI station under a different name. One has all this stuff in the middle of everything that is going on such that one does not know who is controlling the prison. One assumes the NIO is behind some of the stuff. I am not saying that out of conspiracy reasoning. It is our desire totally to deal with the prison and to make it a conflict-free society because, equally, I represent the workers in the POA as well. I would not have an agreement which put them under any threat of harm or intimidation. I represent these people too.

On Roe House, I think it can become some people's view of life that they can boss people about and have a bit of power over people. In the August 2010 agreement, by the way, we included the right to conduct strip searches if there was intelligence evidence to suggest a person was smuggling drugs, arms or parts of arms. It was accepted by everyone in the agreement that there would be strip searching in that context. However, it is actually done on the basis that it is part of everyday life as opposed to on the basis of intelligence. Mr. McFeely might wish to add to that.