Mr. Tim O'Connor:

I thank the Deputy. Concerning the final days, the Deputy is also referring to the way the different issues were handled and the negotiating process. It was a mix. It was not the Harvard conflict school of perfect negotiation, where everything took place in plenary. There were break-outs and private discussions going on. Parties were different in their approaches. Some had particular things they were trying to get advanced, covered and protected. The two Governments and we officials, with George Mitchell, did the overall frame of the document and built up the pieces. I can understand what Jeffrey was saying there about more input.

On the issues on the day, I was not party to that. Some of this was at a high political level in terms of the precise nature of the final compromises on the issues the Deputy referred to. There were huge tensions in the last 24 hours. President Clinton was involved, as well, in phone calls from Washington, working the phones all through the night, I think. In the end, whatever was going to come out would be a compromise and nobody would get everything they wished for. It was not that people would agree to everything but that people could live with everything. That is where we were getting to

It is on public record what Bertie Ahern had to do in the course of that week. We are all human beings and live our lives. In the middle of all of that, his mother died on the Monday. George Mitchell called us all together on 25 March for a pep talk for the delegates. All of us crowded into a room bigger than this and what he said went something like this: "I have been with you now for three years. It's been marvellous. I have listened to your stories. They are wonderful stories and I'm sure you have more of them, as well." He said: "In the meantime, a son has been born to me in New York and I would like to see him before he goes to college, so I am declaring a deadline by which our discussions must draw to an end and decisions be reached." There was a sharp collective intake of breath. That began the process with the intensity that was referred to. We knew then that George's deadline was 9 April, which was the Thursday of that week. We actually missed it by a day.

On Monday, 6 April, Bertie Ahern's mother died. He had three days and was trying to cope with managing all of that. George Mitchell gave a first draft of the agreement to all delegations on the Monday night. We called it "Mitchell One". That had an elaborate cross-Border section, which one of the unionist negotiators said they would not touch with a 40 ft bargepole. We were in immediate crisis. This was Monday or Tuesday. Bertie Ahern, in the course of funeral arrangements for his mother in Dublin, was thinking about this and knew that on the basis of the reaction of the unionist party to the North-South piece, we would not get agreement unless there is a compromise. He made a decision to scale back the level of ambition for the cross-Border, take a risk and get agreement on that, though it would be less than we would ideally have liked. We had drafted much more. That was a big risk. To do that, we are still in the agreement and are going to change Articles 2 and 3 without knowing the details. All we got in the Good Friday Agreement on the North-South strand is the frame. The detail would be later. We had to make the move on constitutional issues without knowing the detail. That is one example. I was heavily involved in that.

The issues Jeffrey was talking about there are hugely sensitive. At a high political level, those compromises were agreed in terms of arrangements with regard to prisoners and decommissioning and the role of parties in decommissioning. We understood there was broad agreement in principle from everybody by Thursday night or Friday morning on that. On that basis, we all thought when it was put together in a single document by George Mitchell, we should be okay. We were not, because when all that came together, Jeffrey and others looked through it and said they would be destroyed, given what they were being asked to sign up to. From his perspective, they were giving away A, B, C and D and look what they were getting in return. He felt it would not wash. He left and others with him, but David Trimble believed there was enough there. The Deputy asked a fair question. It is for politicians to decide if this is something they can go with because, as Deputy Brendan Smith said, they will pay a price.

I was the deputy secretary of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, which sat from 1994 to 1996, and we had distinguished international visitors come and talk to us. There was a big meeting of the board and we had F.W de Klerk. I cannot really do the Afrikaans accent but will try. In his speech, he said: "In negotiations, the most difficult discussions are not with your adversary across the table. They are with your own side." The discussions going on in the Good Friday negotiations were also in the rooms of the parties. That is an example of the difficult internal discussion Jeffrey was talking about. There were difficult internal discussions taking place in all the rooms. That is a key part of it. People not in the front line of the negotiations, when the delegates come back to the room and say what they will agree, say "What? Are you kidding me?" It is about judgment calls, what you can live with and wear and Jeffrey is on the record as saying it was too much from his perspective.