Mr. David Donoghue:

It moved quickly after that initial crisis.

On the point in respect of Blair, he got a landslide victory in 1997 but he had been thinking for some time before that of taking an initiative on Northern Ireland. Bertie Ahern had contact with him before they each became head of government. It is not as if Blair decided only when he saw the scale of the victory that he could do something on Northern Ireland. For some time before that - let us say it was a year - he had been planning it.