Mr. Tim O'Connor:

That is very kind of Senator Blaney. I appreciate his kind remarks. We are wandering around out there with a lot of stuff in our heads, so it is good to be asked to come back. Otherwise, this information is just rattling around in my head. It is great to be with people who care as much as the committee members do. I very much appreciate that.

The Senator has asked me an important question about the parties. I will focus on the parties and the politicians. I am not just saying this because I am in front of a group of politicians, but I chose to be a civil servant who was around politicians for my whole career. I did 36 years in the Civil Service. I knew the difference between us. The politicians have to go out and put themselves before the people every few years, whereas I did not. Politicians ultimately make the decisions, and our job is to support them in that. However, there was always an opportunity to challenge them as well and to come up with other ways of thinking. My point is that the ultimate decisions were not made by the civil servants. The ultimate calls were by the politicians. That is where the hard stuff had to be done.

Regarding was happening in Castle Buildings and afterwards, I will tell a story that is not often told. When you hear the name George Mitchell, everybody thinks of the Good Friday Agreement and negotiation. Actually, I think George Mitchell’s biggest contribution was possibly not during the Good Friday Agreement negotiation, although he was vital to it. While the committee members will remember this, what is less remembered in the public space is that George Mitchell was called back approximately 15 months later in the summer of 1999. This was a long 15 months after the agreement, when we were still no further in implementing it. We were still stuck at “no guns, no Government”. Like in "Ghostbusters", “Who you gonna call?” - George Mitchell.

The two Governments reached out to George Mitchell in the summer of 1999 - this was a full 14 or 15 months after the agreement - to say, “George, we need you back”. He came back in early September 1999. He spent about two and a half months working there, but this was different. When he was chair of the talks, he had a big team around him, including Martha Pope and a whole bunch of people and staffers who were working with him. He came this time on his own. A number of officials of the Irish and British Governments were assigned to him, such as Dermot Gallagher, the Lord have mercy on him, Rory Montgomery and I were assigned as the three officials from the Irish Government. There was also Bill Jeffrey and Jonathan Stephens from the British Government.

What George Mitchell did over the next two and a half months, which I saw up close, was work directly with the politicians and with the party leaderships. This was on his own in conversations to force them together. At one point, he brought them all for a weekend to Winfield House in London, which is the residence of the American ambassador, who was a friend of his. I was not there. We were in London and I was nearby, but we were not in the house. Apparently, over the dinner, he would not allow them to talk politics. They had to talk about themselves. This notion was completely unheard of. Things were still very difficult. The unionists were not talking to Sinn Féin politicians at any time. They would not speak to them in the corridor. At this stage, things were still very tense at a political level. However, George Mitchell found a way to start building up some beginnings of trust at human level. In fairness to all the politicians in the building, everybody knew, as I was saying earlier, that this was their one opportunity. If it broke down, not only would we be back to where we were, we would be worse off because politics would have been seen to have been tried and to have failed. There would have been a greater sense of despair. George Mitchell played a very big role.

Regarding the negotiations, the format was that much of it was done bilaterally between the two Governments, between Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern working together, and with the party leaders and party delegations coming in for one-on-one meetings. We, as civil servants, might have been running with a draft trying this piece of language or that piece of language. I saw with my own eyes that that is how the trust was being built. Everybody had the sense of responsibility.

All the committee members will know what happened at the end, on Good Friday itself. There was a four-hour crisis inside the Ulster Unionist Party and their delegation. That was the longest day. We thought at 11 o'clock in the morning on Good Friday that we had an agreement. The understanding was that all parties had signed off on all parts of the agreement. George Mitchell and his team pulled together the final draft, which was circulated to all delegations. Bear in mind we were all in delegation rooms in Castle Buildings and that we were scattered over three floors. The understanding was that all the parts had been agreed. If all the parts had been agreed, then there should not have been a difficulty with the totality. At about 11 o'clock, we all had copies of the agreement and looking through it.

The next thing, word spread that the Ulster Unionists were in trouble and that downstairs on the ground floor a revolt was taking place. The view was that it was too much. There was a bilateral negotiation over the next four hours between David Trimble and Tony Blair, who was on the third floor. My only contribution to peace at that time was to be on the corridor to see who was going up and down on the lifts. We had all gone back to pessimism. We felt it was finished, that we were gone, that we were done for, that we were so close and now it was gone. At about 4.30 p.m., there was an exchange of a private letter from Tony Blair to David Trimble, which resolved it. David Trimble had to make a big move. That is what I understand, although I was not in the room, obviously.

He read out the letter and he said to his colleagues who were gathered that this was enough and that he would tell George Mitchell to convene the plenary. He told them that those who wanted to follow him should do so and those who did not want to do so should not. That is what happened and moments later the plenary was convened, agreement was reached and so it happened.

Everybody is taking the risk and the chance. Without that, there will be no agreement if people are not prepared to come into the room and, despite all the difficulties separating people in their fundamental positions, compromise must be reached. We are in danger of "compromise" becoming a dirty word. No agreement will be possible if people are not prepared to compromise because the absolute and fundamental positions of both sides are fundamentally contradictory. We only get agreement if both sides are prepared to compromise in some kind of way and that is what the Good Friday Agreement was.

I was asked if the Good Friday Agreement is out of date and I go back to the operation. This is the fundamental piece of surgery. People say they are unhappy with the Good Friday Agreement so I ask them what their alternative is. The alternative cannot be just about delivering on the absolute position of one side. It has to pass the test of the Good Friday Agreement, which is that it was something everybody could sign up to. I ask those people to come up with an alternative that will get agreement by everybody. After trying other alternatives, you will end up back with the Good Friday Agreement. There are issues around it, it has a review clause and there is challenging territory around it in the future, which is for the committee and its members as politicians. As a citizen, I say the answer will lie in agreement and I am agnostic about it. We have to find agreement. I do not start out from an ideological position one way or the other. Did the people pay a price for peace? Yes and there are risks involved for the politicians. Every move they make, especially big moves, have risks involved which could involve a price and you do not know that in advance. I am full of admiration for the courageous decisions that were taken by people. It would have been easier and safer to walk away, which is what had happened most of the other times in the past. The risk was there for everybody to pay a huge price on the day.