Professor Christopher McCrudden:

I will address Mr. Eastwood's point about the criteria for calling a referendum. He is absolutely right that the Good Friday Agreement does not really specify the criteria beyond requiring the Secretary of State to call a referendum where he or she considers a majority in favour of reunification would result. The case I mentioned earlier in the Court of Appeal goes into this in some detail because Mr. McCord tried to pin down the Secretary of State as to the criteria. My colleague at Queen's University Belfast, Colin Harvey, has written to the Secretary of State in pretty much the same terms asking what the criteria would be. There was a document disclosed as a result of a request from a senatorial colleague of members for information from the Secretary of State that seems to indicate the thinking at the moment.

Boiled down, Mr. Eastwood is right that the Secretary of State has to take into account all relevant considerations and exclude all irrelevant considerations. In the report, we have set out four or five different elements the Secretary of State could draw on, including opinion polls, assembly recommendations, the number of seats particular parties have and so on. We are unable, given the way section 1 of the Northern Ireland Act is framed, to pin down any further what the weighting would be for any particular criterion. If Mr. Eastwood is looking for criteria of weighting between the different considerations, that would be difficult to construct.

One thing we say should not be weighted is what we have called the demographic issue, that is, crudely, the number of Catholics and Protestants who will be identified in the census. We have said that anybody who knows Northern Ireland knows it would be risky for the Secretary of State to rely simply on the demographics because, of course, we know that some Catholics will vote for continued unity with the rest of the UK and vice versa. Beyond that, I think the difficulty of weighting the different criteria remains.