Mr. Mark Durkan:

I thank the Chair and the committee for the opportunity to share some reflections as we approach the 25th anniversary of the Agreement.

That Agreement was not only the result of concentrated negotiations in the weeks and months leading up to 10 April 1998. Its achievement rested on layers of understanding built up in disparate phases including the New Ireland Forum, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Hume-Adams dialogue, the Brooke-Mayhew talks and the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation. Some collective ambiguity was a necessary part of the coinage for the process in 1998 but this was supposed to be supplemented by a growing collective certainty which should have stemmed from the implementation of its provisions and faithful adherence to its precepts.

The suboptimal experience of subsequent vagaries should not be allowed to invalidate the broad balanced architecture of the agreement or the unique integrity of its resounding democratic endorsement by the people of Ireland, North and South.

The agreement secured a framework for the three sets of relationships and a platform of guaranteed rights. Its three strands have seen varied episodes of performance; sometimes with evident good purpose, sometimes with recalcitrance and, for too long, confounded by the discoloration from Brexit. Its rights promises have been serially neglected or frustrated, deliberately eroded in this Commons mandate and threatened with eradication if the European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR, is further relegated or even repudiated.

We have to be honest about such divergences and deficits in implementing the agreement. These also include the gross misapplication of the agreement’s clear intent on petitions of concern, the St. Andrews Agreement mistaken departure from the joint nomination and election by the Assembly of joint First Ministers, the abandonment of the Civic Forum in the North, which also aborted the complementary North-South civic consultation arrangements that had been agreed by the North-South Ministerial Council, NSMC, in June 2002, the underdevelopment of strand 2 and the underuse of strand 3.

There is no point in pretending that tyres are only flat at the bottom, but neither should we despair as though the wheels have come off. The agreement has review provisions. Such necessary facilities for respective strands or in overall terms should not be ignored as we celebrate and contemplate the 25th anniversary. A spirit of renewal review would allow us to be honest about shortcomings in the agreement’s outworkings and Brexit’s disruptive fallout, while showing positive purpose about its under-tapped enabling potential. The bandwidth of strands 2 and 3 allow for creative lateral thinking that could answer some of the problems created by the fact and form of Brexit. Why deny such relevant exploration as we celebrate what we achieved in 1998 but have not fully advanced since? Such constructive institutional explorations can take place at the same time as due consideration of how we can reflect the agreement’s key precepts around constitutional status and consent in terms that respect the equal legitimacy of two aspirations, as affirmed by the agreement.

Democratic pro-agreement Ireland needs to engage in careful deliberation and respectful discourse on a basis that sees responsible curation of the spirit and letter of Article 3 of the Constitution as so finely worded in the agreement. There is a real need to illuminate the serious issues that need to be factored sensitively so we might have healthy debate with honest differences about honest preferences as posited in the agreement, with its overarching commitments to reconciliation and rapprochement. Such necessary, thoughtful and helpful light will not come from deferring duly deliberative discourse or from seeking dubious determinations from the current British Government.

Unpreparedness in the name of respect or reconciliation is not really a responsible approach. The value of preparedness, that is, advance thinking, collective anticipation, building layers of understanding and showing responsibility, all in the spirit of respect and with the clear aim of reconciliation, is an important lesson from the long journey that John Hume piloted to the Good Friday Agreement.