Mr. Jonathan Powell:

I thank the Deputy and I am not sure my words can be described as wisdom. Earlier I briefly mentioned that I think this is an important issue. It was crucial at the time to have power-sharing and, therefore, a way of reaching cross-community agreements. Due to the history of Northern Ireland where one party and one tradition had ruled totally and no-one else had a look in, you had to have a system that allowed power-sharing and allowed issues to be agreed by both communities together. I think that was a fundamental basis of the agreement.

There is a problem, however, and I have written about it a bit in the past, when it becomes permanent, as in Bosnia, when this can be a real problem. In Bosnia it led to appalling corruption, regimes are in power the whole time, there is no way to challenge them and one cannot get them out. It is leading now to really serious intergroup tensions and may well bust the actual peace agreement. So some flexibility needs to be built into this. The Alliance Party made a very fair point by asking what about us, and if one just has designation then even though we have a heck of a lot of votes, we do not get a say in these things because we are not designating one side or the other. As I have said already, it would be a mistake to upturn this at the moment because things are so sensitive. As I have also complained, when the current British Prime Minister is trying to redefine the terms of consent and cross-community consensus in a dangerous way, then we should stick pretty firmly to what is said in the agreement at the moment. If we can get the institutions up and running again and get back to stability in Northern Ireland, then there would be time to start thinking about the future. I mean this was all built-in initially to defend a Catholic or nationalist minority against unionist hegemony. Now the unionists, I suspect, will be a minority after the census and they may need protection too, so I think to change it just at that moment would be particularly pointed and not a good idea.

The Deputy is absolutely right that if this goes on forever, the Northern Ireland political system will not work so we will have to think about some way of getting to more normal politics. I am not quite sure how or when that will happen.