Mr. Tim O'Connor:

I thank Ms Gildernew for her questions and offer her my good wishes. It was very good of her to come along in the circumstances. I thank her for her kind comments. I also have very good memories.

In terms of the Good Friday Agreement, as everyone here is aware, in politics there is always the next thing. Straight away, one is on to the next thing. Even after Good Friday itself, on the Easter weekend we got a couple of night's sleep but then it was straight into the referendum. A campaign had to be run and there was a huge body of work to be done for the referendum on 22 May. Then we were straight into dealing with the North-South issues. As I said earlier, there was only agreement in principle. We just had a shell of what North-South would look like.

I was appointed by Mr. Dermot Gallagher - Lord have mercy on him - to be the foreign affairs person to drive the North-South negotiations on what these cross-Border bodies would be, working with Mr. Wally Kirwan. I thank the Chairman for his kind words about the Department and about other colleagues. I am the one sitting here today but there was a whole village of civil servants involved. A huge amount of work was done by so many of my colleagues. We had to set off on the road to getting agreement. Mr. Kirwan, Mr. Rory Montgomery, Mr. James McIntyre and I went off on what we called a "caravan" whereby we went to all of the Departments in the summer of 1998 to gather up ideas for these cross-Border bodies that would make sense and would work out. In September we began negotiations with the British. We had to work out what North-South was going to look like and what the bodies would be. A whole process had to be gone through and that ended up in agreement in March 1999. Legislation then had to be put through the Dáil and Seanad to bring these bodies into being. They were then parked for eight or nine months until the difficulties in the implementation of the agreement were resolved. I am sure Ms Gildernew will recall the sound bite, "No guns, no Government". In December, Ms Gildernew and her colleagues were about to become Ministers. Everything came into being on 2 December 1999 - the assembly, the Executive, the North-South Ministerial Council and the cross-Border bodies. I was sent to Armagh. I had to take ownership of what we had designed and go from wholesale to retail, so to speak, by actually setting up the bodies, including Waterways Ireland and Tourism Ireland. I did that for five and a half years in Armagh.

I was there at the very beginning of setting up all of the things Ms Gildernew is talking about now. I said at the time that the architecture was really important. In fact, Mr. David Trimble used that phrase. History shows, and it is largely agreed, that Sunningdale came down because of the Council of Ireland and the fact there was no agreement on that. There may have been other issues too but that was certainly a big one. We got the North-South Ministerial Council and the cross-Border bodies up and running under the Good Friday Agreement. Mr. Trimble was asked once why we were able to get cross-Border co-operation going this time and not previously. He said that in the Good Friday Agreement we got the architecture right. What he meant by that was the checks and balances. As Ms Gildernew knows, we have accompanying Ministers, all decisions by agreement and so on.

That architecture has broadly worked. As to whether the glass is half full or half empty, what we got going and what has been established in cross-Border co-operation over the past 20 years has been very important and valuable. Tremendous work is being done by Tourism Ireland and Waterways Ireland. For the first time, the island of Ireland is being marketed by a single body. Tourism has had a very positive impact. Obviously Covid has affected it but, broadly speaking, tourism is regarded as a major sector. I am sure all members of this committee can see that in their respective constituencies. That has been driven for the past 20 years by a cross-Border body, Tourism Ireland.

We used to say there is only one thing worse than not getting what you wish for and that is getting what you wish for. When the first chief executive of Tourism Ireland, Mr. Paul O'Toole, was appointed by the North-South Ministerial Council, I congratulated him and said, "No pressure now." In the negotiations we used tourism all of the time as a clear example of an area where it just made no sense to be doing things separately and where it made perfect sense to be doing things together. I told Mr. O'Toole he had better prove us right, and that has happened.

Ms Gildernew's question is fair. Have we achieved what we set out to achieve? Absolutely not. The difficulties that have arisen, to which Ms Gildernew refers, are not actually difficulties of cross-Border co-operation however. North-South co-operation has proven itself. The difficulties Ms Gildernew is talking about are difficulties of wider political architecture because of the Northern Ireland protocol and so on. The DUP is withholding its MLAs and all of that. What is blocking cross-Border co-operation is not actually to do with the substance of that co-operation but with wider politics. I hope that what at least has been established definitively, with data, over the past 20 years is that cross-Border co-operation makes sense and delivers. I am afraid I will have to kick it back to the politicians because they are going to have to try to resolve the wider political issues. We know cross-Border co-operation makes sense.

Deputy Brendan Smith is from the Border region and he knows the value of being able to get at cross-Border co-operation. The potential was there for 100 years but we had never been able to get at it until the early 2000s.

That is my long-winded answer. It is not just about the potential and it has been proven by the bodies and by other things like the all-Ireland electricity market, which is actually outside the North-South Ministerial Council. The case is made that cross-Border co-operation works and just makes sense, although we still have to get the politics right.