Mr. David Donoghue:

I thank the Chairman. It is a great pleasure and honour to be here and, indeed, to be here with my good friend, Mr. Rory Montgomery. I will make a brief opening statement. I had a long involvement with Northern Ireland policy and Anglo-Irish relations while I was working in the Department of Foreign Affairs. I served in the Anglo-Irish section in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I worked in different capacities on the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s, and the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement negotiations in the 1990s. In the second half of the 1990s, I was the Irish head of an institution that members may have heard of called the Anglo-Irish secretariat, otherwise known as "the Bunker" or "Maryfield", in Belfast.

My main role during the Good Friday Agreement negotiations was to liaise on a continuous basis with the British Government on all aspects and to try to interpret British thinking and intentions for our Government. I finished my involvement with Northern Ireland in 1999 and went off to do other things. I had the pleasure of meeting the Chairman in New York a few years ago during one of my later roles but I still keep a very close interest in what is going on and I try to contribute in various ways. I have completed a book on the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, which will be published later this year.

I will not read out my entire statement give the time constraints. The first key point to make is that from the mid 1980s onwards we have been guided by the principle of close co-operation between the Irish and British Governments on all the aspects I mentioned, from the Anglo-Irish Agreement right through to the Good Friday Agreement. The road we travelled together was not always easy but, nevertheless, the two Governments were the motor. That applies particularly to the lengthy negotiations, which eventually reached culmination on Good Friday 1998.

It would be fair to say that in the summer of 1997 we reached a turning point with the arrival of two new Administrations in Dublin and London, which had solid majorities and which were in a position to give fresh impetus to the partnership. These were led, as we all know, by Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair, respectively. That created favourable conditions for the restoration of the IRA ceasefire in the summer of 1997 and for the convening of all-party talks, with everybody at the table for the first time, on substance. We had previously had a large grouping of the parties in 1996 but at a point where we had not yet got the substance. As of September 1997 we were finally able to get to substantive talks with everybody at the table.

Another confidence-building factor was the availability of George Mitchell as an independent mediator and chair for the talks along with his two colleagues. Most importantly, we had the presence of President Clinton behind the scenes. He was, as the members will know, a remarkable asset because he was a president with an unrivalled knowledge of the Northern Ireland situation going back quite a while and an unrivalled interest in the developments. He worked very closely with the Taoiseach and the Prime Minister of the day. I often think of him as a third partner to those negotiations. We were blessed in a sense with those happy developments as of the summer of 1997.

We had set out in two landmark documents a few years earlier a joint understanding between the British and Irish Governments of how constitutional issues would be articulated in the future agreement we were aiming at. These documents, as the members will know, were the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 and the Joint Framework Document of February 1995. Between them, those two documents, in a sense, were trying to demonstrate to republicans that if they were to abandon violence and commit absolutely to peaceful politics, they could take part in a comprehensive talks process, which would validate Irish unity as a legitimate political objective and would also ensure a level playing field for people of both traditions, in a careful balancing of two key concepts, namely, self-determination and consent. The two Governments agreed the people of Ireland had a right to self-determination but the way in which this right was exercised would be subject to the principle of consent. It was a complex concept but one which married positions that were important to people of the two main traditions. It provided the basis for us to move towards the more operational end of the negotiations, getting into a potential agreement, which would cover the three strands, various institutions and human rights concepts, including equality. We had to first get the constitutional issues right and get them into a position which would be acceptable on both sides. We did that with those two documents and that opened the way for what eventually became the Good Friday Agreement.

I do not have much time to go into the decommissioning of weapons but there is no doubt it stymied our efforts for several years. We, on the Irish Government side, found it simply impossible to accept this as a legitimate issue to be resolved in advance of negotiations. We could understand there would be an expectation that weapons would be eventually decommissioned as part of a new political dynamic but we could not accept that it would be made a precondition for taking part in negotiations to begin with. Suffice to say, that bedevilled our efforts for quite a while. If I were to tot it up, we probably spent 18 months or two years trying to find a way around this decommissioning blockage, a blockage which the British Government contributed to erecting. This was prior to the Blair Government. However, eventually we found a way by the autumn of 1997, which enabled decommissioning to be handled in a separate sub-committee of the negotiations. We still had to keep an eye on it and it would come back to haunt us from time to time but it was essentially handled apart from the main negotiations. That meant that as of September 1997 we were pointing towards a substantive agreement which eventually came. I will leave it at that because I know I have only five minutes at my disposal.