Professor Colin Harvey:

These are great comments and questions from members. What today is underlining is that Ireland made fundamental constitutional changes as a consequence of the agreement. The overriding concern at the moment is, for reasons that are about the peculiarity of the British constitutional legal system, the agreement has not found the home it needed to find within that system, and I think that needs to change. If that means changing domestic law to reflect these things more effectively, then that must be done.

I am going to underline something today speaking in a personal capacity. I found myself in the public sphere recently in relation to a range of interventions, some of which have not been entirely pleasant, and somebody commented to me about what would be the case if we had an executive in the North. It made me think about this evidence session today because that is an incredibly problematic narrative and it is suffocating political discourse on the island at the moment. The idea that the answer to all the problems in Northern Ireland rest in an executive and an assembly is fundamentally wrong. It is not true, and I think it is creating a dangerous narrative and expectations around any power-sharing administration that may return. The things that we are talking about today rest within the gift of both governments to show leadership - to show, not tell. This is a call today for both the British and Irish Governments to show, not tell. The implementation gaps that we are identifying today primarily rest with either or both governments. So in the spirit of showing and not just telling, it is about time both governments worked harder, as co-guarantors of that agreement, to take these forward and make them meaningful.

There are British-Irish negotiations ongoing around what is happening in terms of the power-sharing administration, but perhaps most significantly in the time ahead are the EU and UK negotiations, in which Ireland has a very significant voice. We have seen the interventions from the US this week as well. I am not somebody who overplays legal remedies, as important as they are. There are also political negotiations upcoming on which pressure must be brought to bear on the British Government to address the range of implementation gap - including in Emma's and Jake's case - that we have outlined today. The negotiations around the withdrawal agreement and protocol - as flawed and problematic as aspects of that are - did show there are ways to do this, so I think it is time for both governments really to step up in relation to the implementation gap that we have mentioned today.