Mr. Tim O'Connor:

If I have only one thing, I will tell the Senator what we did not understand on Good Friday.

We thought that the key thing was to get agreement, get it over the line and get the deal. We were right that this was really important. As I said earlier, the difference between getting agreement and not doing so is the same as the difference between night and day. However, the journey was only starting because implementation is also a negotiation. We have been negotiating it ever since. In a way, we are still negotiating it. I had a bit of a joke with George Mitchell. It was slightly smart-alecky but I told him that the Good Friday Agreement was an Irish agreement, in that we signed it first and then negotiated it. That is kind of what has been going on. If I was to do it all over again, I would have much more respect and appreciation for the fact that we were only beginning a journey of negotiation. To go back to architecture, while it would not solve everything because structure is not a substitute for substance, it would be wise to put in place a proper structure to oversee implementation because what happened is that, the minute we got agreement, we all scattered to the hills. Ultimately, we got the Executive up and running and the MLAs and Ministers went off to do their piece in the Executive and the Assembly. I had gone off to Armagh where I was working on the cross-Border bodies. There was also a British-Irish body. Nobody was watching over the totality of this, however. It is a great question and one answer is that you have to appreciate that you are just beginning a new process of negotiation and that you need to put a formal framework in place to oversee implementation just as you have for the negotiations themselves. We did not understand that at all.