Mr. Mark Durkan:

There is a lesson in the process that gave us the agreement. The inclusive nature of the process was important. Having been involved in different talks processes, including the Brooke-Mayhew talks I found the more inclusive, bigger table for the Good Friday Agreement better in the sense that in a tighter situation, parties are very defensive about their own idiom or they are very careful about accepting language from other parties or whatever. In the more open process, it was easier; language was able to be seasoned not least by people like the Women's Coalition; people were able to bring in a different perspective or maybe couch things in somewhat less political and what sounded like more academic terms. That was able to neutralise the debate and open up discussion away from fixed positions. That was important. Then there was the role of the two Governments working together. Remember, the work that the two Governments were doing in those talks was, as I said, based on other layers of understanding that had been built up over the years. A lot of the language in the agreement was not actually new to 1998. A lot of the language in the agreement is actually derived from the Downing Street Declaration for instance, or from the frameworks document which in turn was influenced by things such as the Brooke-Mayhew talks and things that had been discussed there. It was building on those layers of understanding which, unfortunately, seem to be completely forgotten on the British Government side. At times, I think that we have gone through an unlearning process since the agreement and the people who have most gone through the unlearning process, to my mind, is the British Government and particularly this British Government which might, in the context of Brexit, pay a lot of lip service to the Good Friday Agreement. Collectively we have not done enough to ensure due adherence to the agreement. I mentioned that the agreement provides for review which we have never really used as constructively as it might be. I know people are sometimes fearful of reviews. They say that if you do a review it will create a run on the agreement but the fact is that I do not think we could do any more damage to the agreement by a review now than, say, by some of the changes that were made at St. Andrews which we are currently paying a price for now because the changes at St. Andrews allowed a party to veto the formation of an executive which was never the case before.

We need to get back to that inclusive spirit when we are facing problems. We also need to remember that we would not have reached the Good Friday Agreement if we had simply talked past each other and ignored where people were saying they had genuine problems or issues. We had to address those issues. We only got an agreement by mutual adjustment. Mutual engagement on its own does not bring about an agreement. It takes mutual adjustment were people are able to vary some of the language either of their proposals or their objections to reach more accommodation. That seems to me to be missing at the minute in the context of all the stand-offs that there are around the protocol and everything else. We need to remember the value of the institutions themselves. The institutions were meant, themselves, to help solve problems and be a way of us facing and tackling problems together. That should be true of the protocol itself. I am not one of those who says to the DUP it should just go into the Executive because the issues of the protocol are clearly between the UK and the EU. I believe that an executive would have good agency in putting forward ideas for improving the workings of the protocol. Both the UK Government and the EU would find it hard to ignore proposals that were agreed by the executive. I do not think that it is impossible to envisage that there could be such proposals; after all, we did have the joint letter from Martin McGuinness and Arlene Foster in August 2016. Just before Theresa May called the election in 2017 the all-party talks that were then taking place included discussions on tackling some of the Brexit issues. Obviously then there were issues like the backstop in the air and all the rest of it. The fact is that you could actually see positive prospects for parties working together, including through their different departmental responsibilities in government, to tackle some of these problems. We just need to learn the lessons of what has worked in the past and what was pointing to a way of working and recover some of that. Also in that context, I would mention paragraph 17 of strand 2 provides that North-South Ministerial Council, NSMC ,can discuss EU matters and that arrangements would be made to ensure that the views of the NSMC could be represented at relevant EU meetings.

That should not be ignored in this context because the Brexiteers tell us that not one letter of the agreement has been changed by Brexit, so that paragraph still stands. We should look at how we can use that to answer many of the complaints about a democratic deficit with the protocol. The NSMC would be a channel for ministers in the North to put forward their views on relevant EU matters. That helps to address some of the problem with the democratic deficit. Let us value what we agreed, appreciate what it took to agree it and maybe acknowledge that we have not been attentive enough in implementing it.