Mr. David Donoghue:

Many times in those few days, we thought the negotiations were going south. By "we", I mean everyone from Bertie Ahern down on our side. It was very difficult to get compromise with the unionists on the legal framework for the North-South bodies. That might seem technical, but it is what much energy was devoted to for the first couple of days. Roughly speaking, it related to the kind of role the assembly would have in defining the mandates for the North-South bodies and things like that. There were several times when we thought we had almost reached an agreement with the unionists but then it fell apart. There was a point at which it looked as if they wanted to have mere feasibility studies, which is a code for saying there would be no action. We were destabilised by that. There were a couple of issues over decommissioning, the various implications of decommissioning and the kind of language we would have in the agreement. The mood swings were significant. Late on the Wednesday evening, we all thought it was over. We also thought it was over on the Friday morning. On one hand, we woke up-----