Mr. David Donoghue:

I wish to come back to a couple of the points the Deputy made. On the question about Trimble preparing his party for the difficult decisions that would be coming, which Mr. Montgomery has touched on, one demonstration of the fact he had not prepared the party was what happened on the last day. Essentially, the way the week unfolded there was a heavy emphasis on Strand 2 and eventually the UUP got an agreement it was happy with there, and then Strand 1. Everything seemed to be fine on the Thursday evening. Trimble went off to a meeting of the United Ulster Unionist Council and came back in great form because it was happy with the way things were going. Then on the Friday, suddenly there was a crisis relating to decommissioning and the possibility Sinn Féin might become ministers without there having been a start made to decommissioning. Suddenly, we were in a big drama where Trimble almost has lost control of his party. Jeffrey Donaldson was talking about walking out, and so on. Clearly, more work should have been done within the UUP to prepare them for that very situation. Everybody knew at that point what the language would be on decommissioning in the agreement, which was it did not require decommissioning at that stage. A significant number of people in the UUP obviously were confronted for the first time on the Friday morning with this prospect. They panicked and then Trimble had to deal with it. The way he dealt with it was he got a side letter from Tony Blair, because there would have been no way the agreement itself would have been reopened to put in something to cover those unionist fears. That was never going to happen. I recall that as an example of where Trimble had not worked on his party in the way which, if I may say so, Bertie Ahern did with Fianna Fáil. Let me move to that point. I remember well it was considered vital for the Government to get the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party onside around Articles 2 and 3 because, as the Deputy knows much better than me, clearly Fianna Fáil had to accept this was a necessary price for everything else that would be coming. Those meetings he was at were pivotal, really, in getting public support later during the referendum. Without Fianna Fáil at that time there would not have been the kind of commanding support that was needed.

In relation to a deadline, I touched on this earlier on. It was just a combination of factors where Mitchell had set the deadline of Holy Thursday. He threw in a bit of emotional blackmail, as it were, by saying he would be going home for the Easter weekend and he would not be coming back. He said this publicly. We assumed he would return eventually, if necessary, but, in effect, he was saying he was here until the end of the week, so take this deadline seriously. I like to think we did and even though there was the last-minute crisis with the UUP we still managed it within Good Friday. To echo the point, it concentrated minds. Mr. Montgomery and myself in other negotiations - he in the EU and me at the UN - have seen how important it is to have a deadline. It might be an illusory one or one easily broken but it gives people a sense they had to do something by a particular point in time. When we actually reached midnight on Holy Thursday, it must be said nobody noticed it. We were going through the whole night so nobody was out there with a watch saying we have missed our deadline but it was clear to everybody Friday was the absolute end of it and that is what it turned out to be.