Dr. Duncan Morrow:

I hope I answer all the questions. If I miss one, Senators can remind me. In some ways, the questions run through each other.

The risk to the Agreement structure is, in my view, not that anybody has intended to break it - the Senator is right and everybody is very aware of it - but that it seems to be inversely proportional to the problem. In that context, I go back to a children's game, Jenga, whereby if one pulls out one strut from somewhere in the middle of the stack, the whole lot collapses on the table. That is my fear. It is not on the level that anybody has a plan; it is that, by pulling this out, one sets off a dynamic.

On the energies and priorities, it is crystal clear that it was not a priority for London. The core priority is renegotiating the relationship with Brussels, and the immigration and trade issues that arise from that are London's absolute priority. The difficulty is that the Northern Ireland settlement was based on a totally different principle. The Ireland settlement was based on the principle that getting control over borders was done through international co-operation, not by putting up big fences. This principle is to get control over borders by putting up big fences. That would really be running a coach and four through the whole structure of what the Good Friday Agreement is about. That is what we are wrestling with here. How do we actually deal with that?

Senator Mark Daly asked if the Agreement has to be renegotiated. It is very difficult to put the challenge we face in particular terms. However, if we wish to retain the core principles of the Good Friday Agreement, we are going to have to do much detailed negotiation about how those principles are adjusted for Brexit. If we do not do the detailed negotiation about those things, then Brexit will unravel the principles of the Good Friday Agreement. That is the problem. It is urgent that we sit round a table and start dealing with these matters in detail. The John Hume doctrine of all those years ago was that nothing was agreed until everything was agreed. All those strands and different dimensions were in an overall package. Nobody got everything that he or she wanted, but everybody got enough to allow matters to move forward. If the Border is taken out of the equation, it strikes me that all the other balances are unpicked. I am asked to speak about reconciliation here. If one wants to protect it, we need to really look at this because the potential for creating much offence-giving resentment on either side of this is pretty large.

Somebody talked about the differing energies in the different capitals. One of the most striking things to me personally, as I go around the North, is the difference in energy between nationalists and unionists, or between remainers and leavers. Many people who are instinctively unionist seem to think that we just need to get on with this, move ahead and get it done. On the other side are the people who really see this as the difficulty it is and are alarmed about what it means in practice - potentially a hard Border and so on.

To go back to the geography of it, the hard Border seems to me to be a fiction in practice, unless somebody is going to put in place large fences and do something about imposing it, in which case we do not have either a hard or soft Border but, rather, a theoretical frontier that is a non-reality. I do not know what the context of that is - I am starting to think of a lawless space in the middle of this island - but the consequence is something to wrestle with, or else one can go back to saying that we will have a hard Border. We have to assume that everybody in the places where the hard Border is imposed will like that and will not seek to resist it. I think that is a difficult proposition in light of our history.

It is not about being alarmist; it is about getting past the nicety of staying calm and starting to really identify the very specific practical problems which have to be looked at here, which is why I said there are five things. The reason I have not come up with a proposal on them is that everything we learned about negotiation here is that one names the heads of agreement and then sits round the frames and tries to fill them in such a way that one can accommodate people in a meaningful way. I do not know whether London has the time, energy or effort to do it. It certainly is not an attack on Mrs. May or saying that she has an agenda to break this down. The consequences of neglect for us are that dynamics start to emerge which, for example, make the assembly in the North and the North-South bodies non-viable and raise various other aspects of the Border question. That starts to amount to a serious set of issues.

Does the Agreement have to be renegotiated? It is probably not the proper term, but we have to talk about how the Agreement is read into the current circumstances, and that will look very like negotiation. I do not know whether there has to be another signatory on the other end. I am certainly not proposing that language of renegotiation but, to be clear, we need to look at that.

That might be something that needs to be done. That question needs to be looked at in detail and we need to ask whether it can be done within the framework of the existing agreements or not. If it can, it should be; and if it cannot, it needs to be acknowledged and we need to move on one way or the other. That would be an important piece of work to do. Can the Good Friday Agreement and its principles be retained within the current frameworks after Brexit or not? I have not done that work.

While I am open to contradiction here, to my knowledge the citizenship arrangements in the Good Friday Agreement are globally unique. We have the most open citizenship arrangement anywhere in the world as far as I know. The formulation of it is that it is the birth right of everybody born in Northern Ireland to be British, Irish or both as they may choose. In other words we can shift between them and furthermore that would be maintained in any further jurisdiction. There is an ongoing inter-penetration of Britishness and Irishness in Northern Ireland which will not stop and which is territorially defined by the Six Counties. That means it is special. I do not know what the language is. Maybe we have to find another language that is not special. That citizenship arrangement does not apply to any other territory on the island of Ireland or the island of Great Britain. That makes it different. There is also the right to shift which Ireland got established through the negotiations such that if Northern Ireland becomes part of Ireland it will be integrated immediately as a member of the European Union. That also makes it unique.

It strikes me that to a certain extent we are dancing on the head of a pin about the specialness issue. We can start to talk about where it is special and where is it not special, but it is certainly different. That is my starting point. It does not really help in a divided society to try to find solutions that do not take account of that difference. The obvious alternative is to have a referendum and have a straightforward discussion on the Constitution one way or another, but that will still not solve the issue of this inter-penetration.

On the specialness of this, I am stuck between my wish and my clarity that this has to be done if one wants a way out of it, and my - if not despair - certainly concern that it is not a priority. So I do not know if it is just a case that nothing will go or whether that then turns into a slow car crash. However, the previous safety net of working on reconciliation, joint institutions and the governments resolving problems when they reached a certain level of escalation are no longer certain to me, as someone living in the North. That creates uncertainty. Uncertainty in ethnically divided societies is the biggest single factor that drives people into polarity. The second one is the loss of trust between the key partners; that is the unilateralism one.

Structurally, looking at this strictly academically, both of those conditions now apply; we have uncertainty and we have a degree of difference because, as the Senator said, Ireland is not even negotiating its own deal but is negotiating it through the European Union. We have a degree of unilateralism and resentment on both sides. I am sure all members of the committee watched the British reaction to Mr. Juncker's speech, which was pretty negative in suggesting that this will become a complicated and difficult negotiation.

I am simply saying we are special and we need attention. While Northern Ireland is not the United Kingdom's priority, one of its priorities for the past 50 years has been not to get bogged down in Northern Ireland. We are heading to a place where we may end up getting bogged down in Northern Ireland. It is incumbent on me to say that. We need to put in place something to deal with that at the level of seriousness it had. I do not think we are manufacturing this. We are actually saying that we ought to do this now because otherwise it will take far longer than it needs to.

On the status issue, as Senator McDowell said, it is not clear that there is a simple legal challenge there. There are many different complex legal Acts, the Lisbon treaty being one. The United Kingdom Supreme Court determined that Brexit could proceed, but it is quite possible that as the negotiations come forward there are certain kinds of Brexit that actually contradict all of those laws and make it impossible. I think we are still stuck within a kind of a case-law situation and we do not know.