Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. O'Connor for coming in. I could ask him questions for two days and not get all my questions in. I was prompted by what Mr. O'Connor said to Senator Blaney about the last day of negotiations and the things that came up, particularly with the unionists and the UUP going into conference. There is a series of interviews that Professor Jennifer Todd and Professor John Coakley did on the negotiated settlement. One interview was done with Jeffrey Donaldson in 1998 which was interesting and which speaks to some of that. The reason I am asking about this is the perspectives that people had on that day, the things they were focused and not focused on and how that has informed our experience beyond that. Can Mr. O'Connor speak to some of those tension points that day? For example, Jeffrey Donaldson was clear - and you could pick anyone - that there were key objectives like the removal of the Republic's territorial claim over Northern Ireland and decommissioning. He said they could never really pin the Irish Government on Articles 2 and 3 and that its representatives kept talking in generalities. He said they were not really engaged in the equality agenda and that they should have had their negotiators in. He said it was essentially happening without them being involved because they did not push themselves into that agenda. He said he did not have a problem against equality but that they just did not give attention to it and he gives a sense of it happening around him.

On concluding the agreement in the final hours, he said that in the early hours of Good Friday morning, Adams and McGuinness walked into a room, held crisis meetings with Blair, Mitchell and Ahern and said they were packing and leaving unless they were given an undertaking that all prisoners would be released within two years and the linkage would be removed between decommissioning, the release of prisoners and the holding of ministerial office. That created the pressure. Mr. O'Connor said in his opening comments that he would be happy to speak to some of those questions around the final day and that is my question. He knows what happened after that.