Mr. Jonathan Powell:

Quite a lot of things in the Good Friday Agreement might have benefited from more thought at that time. It was all done in the middle of the night at the last minute. When we look back at it, it is a bit vague on quite a number of issues. In retrospect it would have been much better if there had been more detail on that and a series of other things. Thank goodness we got the agreement. Had we spent another three days and nights we might have found the thing unwinding rather than getting into greater detail. The idea always was that more detail would have to be negotiated. I did not realise it would mean nine years more negotiation before it was implemented.

People speak about the period between the Good Friday Agreement and the St. Andrews Agreement almost as wasted time. I do not know about this. In a way what happened during that time was that it allowed trust to be built through the negotiation. I have seen this elsewhere in the world. In many ways implementation is the single most important thing about a peace agreement. A peace agreement is never just a piece of paper. It does not build trust. We have a piece of paper because the two sides do not trust each other. They only come to trust each other when they start to implement it. This is why something such as the Oslo Accords fall over. It is because no one implements them.

The long painful process on decommissioning, getting the institutions up and running, and implementing the human rights provisions, language provisions and policing was not a waste. It was the crucial aspect of building trust. I spoke about Ian Paisley. The period from 2004 to 2006 was very important in building enough trust with him, and between him and Sinn Féin even though they were not meeting, to allow a lasting agreement and get Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness into government. One of the lessons of the Good Friday process for all negotiations around the world is always to think about the implementation phase even when in the early stages of negotiation.

A peace process is never over and goes on so the implementation phase is in many ways more important even than the piece of paper that one gets to.