Mr. Rory Montgomery:

There are lots of people who could be named. The Deputy mentioned Kevin McNamara but one name we should never forget is that of Mo Mowlam, who played a really important role not even so much in the negotiations themselves in the final stages but more in terms of developing relationships between the British Government and all strands of society in Northern Ireland so she certainly deserves to be remembered.

David Andrews and Liz O'Donnell are not to be forgotten either. Of course, there was the previous generation of leaders as well, like Albert Reynolds. John Bruton played his part, as did others. That is the first thing.

The Deputy also mentioned Ted Kennedy. That is a telling name because his brother, the president, did everything he could to avoid any engagement with the Irish issue at all - even when he came to Ireland in 1963. He just did not want to do it. The Irish ambassador to the US at the time wrote in a report that when he was talking to the president about the matter and mentioned the question of Irish unity, the president looked as if he had got another of his headaches. Ted Kennedy was totally different. Why was this? It was partly because he came from Boston, though so of course did JFK. It was John Hume above all who had the idea of reaching out to Irish America in a new way, bypassing the traditional structures of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and all the rest and speaking to the political mainstream. Then there was fantastic work done by successive Irish embassies in Washington but above all by Seán Donlon and Michael Lillis in the 1970s, and others. That helps to explain that.

The third question was on whether the Ulster Unionists had prepared the ground. The answer was they effectively had not. They were hopelessly badly organised. Mr. Donoghue knows this very well. When they came into meetings and so on, I think Jonathan Powell once said it was if they were meeting each other for the first time very often and that they had never talked. Sinn Féin was brilliantly well-organised and systematic both in the way it approached the negotiations but also, as I think Ms Gildernew was saying, in the way in which it consulted and informed people about what was going on, which was really important and significant. The United Ulster Unionist Council was the particular way the party worked. It was not elected but its members were the representatives of all the constituency associations. In a strange way the Ulster Unionist Party was more democratic in its approach to its internal positions than anybody else. It did not work very well. They did not prepare the ground; not at all. A lot of people within unionism would have found it hard enough to swallow power-sharing and North-South co-operation even if there had not been the whole question of republicans, prisoners, decommissioning and all the rest of it, so they did not prepare the ground. On the other hand, if Trimble had been paying more attention to his grassroots would he have gone for it? Maybe not. Certainly his predecessor James Molyneaux avoided like the plague anything resembling a bold initiative.

I have a quick anecdote on Articles 2 and 3. Séamus Mallon told the story of how some time just around the time of the agreement in a meeting in south Armagh, he read out the text of Articles 2 and 3. He said we cannot be giving those up and we have to keep them. Then he said, "Well actually lads, these are the new Articles 2 and 3". When people read Articles 2 and 3 they knew. They read fantastically well in my view and were a much more modern and open approach to the whole question, without sacrificing the ideal of unity.

On North-South relationships, the Deputy is absolutely right. There is a natural impulse behind the all-island economy anyway. It makes business sense. A strange irony has been Brexit has probably done more to develop that economy than almost anything. The question is whether the North-South institutions have done all they could to support this, build on it and channel it. I do not think so. Much of what is happening and has happened has been the result of individual businesses and initiatives seeing opportunities.

On the health question, the Deputy is absolutely right. One of the very first studies we did in this Royal Irish Academy ARINS project was precisely about North-South health co-operation. There were some very eminent academics such as Professor Deirdre Heenan and others. Even in the area of statistics there are enormous gaps and black holes when it comes to being able to compare outcomes North and South and there are huge issues of co-operation. I am on the board of Cancer Trials Ireland, which promotes all-Ireland cancer research. Again, there are lots of efforts but the structures are not there to develop it as we should, so the Deputy is entirely correct on that.