Mr. David Donoghue:

I will supplement what Mr. Montgomery has said. When we were negotiating the agreement - for the couple of years beforehand - we knew there would have to be special arrangements made on all sides to ensure that key decisions were supported by a majority of both traditions. There was almost common ground on that. The UUP never really challenged it. The phrase used was "sufficient consensus". There had to be some formula that would demonstrate that a decision was carried by both traditions. Out of that came this idea that we would need the members of the Assembly to designate as one or the other. At the time it was seen entirely as a positive thing. Nobody was warning about what would happen if people were neither one or the other because the issue was not on the radar screen. The "other" category was never likely to be significant back then. In the meantime, it is now of greater interest because the "other" category is getting bigger and bigger.

I still feel we are a long way off, dare I say it, tinkering with the agreement. I do not mean that in a pejorative sense. We cannot really go back to reopen the agreement. Review is the key point. One could argue that, technically, the St. Andrews Agreement could have been seen as a review. The truth is that there has been no formal declared review of the agreement since 1998. That is as far as I think we should ever go. If there was any talk about renegotiating or reopening the agreement, it would be fatal. The issue that comes up most often is whether we still need to have this requirement for people to designate as nationalist or unionist. I think we do. Call me old-fashioned but I do not believe we have reached the point where we can dispense with that vital protection. In five years' time, it might look different. We have the Alliance Party trend but obviously a lot of things would have to happen. I feel it is too early to imagine that we can do without that protection. We need to demonstrate that every key decision is supported by both sides. By the same token, while one could play around with titles and so on, the joint leadership is also a vital part of that.