Mr. Tim O'Connor:

Very impressive. That is a very careful, delicate construct of checks and balances. For every check that is put in, there is a balance. For every concept, there is a countervailing concept. It is the cumulative and collective impact of it that actually then reflects it. All the pieces have to be taken together. What is happening now of course is that elements are taken and consent is used all over the place in different means. This was our best attempt. In the opening sentence of Article 1 it recognises the “legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland with regard to its status”. Even an amateur such as myself can look at the first paragraph and see it is about the status of Northern Ireland. That is a key thing we are addressing here. The Chair was quite right that those questions are now back in play. There is now a dispute about what that means. What did we do in the Good Friday Agreement in regard to the status of Northern Ireland? Anytime you hear the phrase “Northern Ireland is an integral part of the United Kingdom”, what does that mean? Could we not have adjusted that in some kind of a way in 1998? That is in dispute as well. We have this very complex - you could even say convoluted – set-up.

There is Article 1(v) which states that whichever Government is exercising sovereignty, whether it is continuation of the union, in which case it is the British Government, or the Irish Government in a future united Ireland, that Government has to exercise its sovereignty with rigorous impartiality as between both traditions in terms of ethos, identities and aspirations. What does that mean?

That is the language we agreed and put in, however. If there was to be equal legitimacy in the context of the aspiration in respect of whether it remains part of the UK or becomes part of a sovereign united Ireland, there would have to be reference to a mechanism by which one could trigger that. The Secretary of State-----