Mr. Chris Hazzard:

It is great to hear Mr. O'Connor's reflections. Ms Gildernew has touched on a lot of the stuff around the North-South issues that I was reflecting on over the past while and we have talked about some of that this morning. I am interested in Mr. O'Connor's idea of the checks and balances in the architecture, which is important. How do we apply the lessons of that to today? We face very different problems now, when we think about climate breakdown, biodiversity issues, coastal erosion, cybersecurity and all the financial services and data sharing issues after Brexit. There are huge areas of growth we need to take on North-South, but it appears the architecture is not fit to help us do that. Whenever a political problem raises its head, it collapses in on itself. Are there lessons from the architecture that was built 25 years ago as to how we reassess and review that today?

The second point, which I think is very important, is the centrality and the importance of a productive and collegiate relationship between Dublin and London. We have seen the impact in recent years whenever that is not there, how difficult it then becomes to keep good relations across these islands and what flows from that. I certainly view that 2007 to 2016 period of roughly a decade as a period when things seemed to go into cold storage. There was nearly a complacency in London and Dublin that things were okay in the North. They were getting on, so the governments could sit back and let them get on with it. I think that was a lost opportunity in that decade or so, and we can see post 2016 the difficulty in reconnecting the relationships and getting that started again. I take on board much of what Mr. O'Connor had to say about that. On the back of that, I want to reflect on how we kick-start it in 2022 because, at the minute, relations are strained probably as much as they have ever been strained. I again thank Mr. O'Connor for his contribution.