Mr. Jonathan Powell:

Let me start with that and then go back to what the Chairman said. On the paramilitarism, it is very hard to distinguish between it and political tendencies. That would be true in our dealings with Sinn Féin, when we were criticised for talking to terrorists, and you are talking to people who have dual roles, military and political. In the case of the loyalists I would go further than the Senator and say not just should they not exist now but that they should never have existed. They should never have been involved in paramilitarism. The trouble is, in the absence of strong political leaders if you do not engage the groups at all they find themselves exploited more and more by unscrupulous politicians from other parties and less and less able to express the political views of their communities.

Always in these cases you want a dual-track approach. You need a really tough security approach on the paramilitarism and the criminality because the people who are suffering are their own communities. It is not someone else who is suffering for what they are doing and their drug-dealing, prostitution and all the rest of it. It is their communities. The police have to, and I believe have been, finding better ways to try to tackle that and they really should come down hard on that criminality. At the same time as you push down, you should have a political way out. Those communities need to have a voice of some sort. I do not think they find their voice in the existing political parties in Northern Ireland. I mean the big political parties. It would be a mistake to just ignore them, even if they are not very large groups. I would take that dual approach of a security and police approach. In fact, if the security service has a role, it should involve that as well as dissident republicans, because it is equally a threat and needs to be dealt with.

In terms of the parliaments, there are many leaders on the backbenches in both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party who would share my views and feel strongly about trying to maintain the good relationship we have built between the two countries. They are committed to maintaining the Good Friday Agreement. I urge the committee to reach out to those parliamentarians and act as a bridge. I hope this will be a temporary phenomenon and Boris Johnson will lead us back to a better relationship and negotiations to resolve the protocol issue. While it can be difficult to engage with unionists, I urge the committee to persevere and not to give up just because they said "No" the first two or three times. Even if it sometimes means private engagement rather than public, I would urge that. It can be frustrating. I spent ten years doing it, so I know it is frustrating but it is definitely worth doing. If you are not talking to them, their fears can become compounded and multiplied and more dangerous. What I learned from ten years of working on the Northern Ireland peace process is the more engagement the better. Without engagement, a vacuum is opened up that all too often gets filled by violence.