Mr. Mark Durkan:

I thank the Deputy for that question. As she says, when we negotiated the agreement, we knew that we working on institutional frameworks and constitutional precepts to take account of the fact that there were two very different aspirations. We wanted to make sure that those differences did not prevent agreed institutions from being established in the North, North-South and east-west. We also knew that we could not write into the terms of all those institutions all the protections that people might feel that they needed, which is why so many of the rights provisions of the agreement appear separately from strand one, strand two or strand three. There is therefore some read-across in strand one to some of the rights provisions but the rights provisions are there separately and distinctly. In some cases, that was because some of the Ulster Unionists' negotiating team had a particular bugbear when it came to questions of rights and we knew that we were not going to get the rights language agreed in strand one itself. It was going to have to be in separate sections.

It would be remiss not to point out that one of the people who had such a big hand in the rights provisions - and there are two sections of the agreement that are headed rights, equality and safeguards - was Mo Mowlam. Mo stayed out of the weeds of the institutional negotiations; she did not want to get involved on the detail about executives, ministers and assembly committees and all the rest of it. She was happy to leave that to Paul Murphy. However, what Mo did concentrate on was making sure that whatever institutions were agreed, there would be strong rights provisions and that those rights provisions would also extend to citizens having the right, using the ECHR to go to court and even overturn Assembly legislation. We wrote it into the agreement. Here we were negotiating to create an assembly but we were actually giving citizens the right to go into the courts and overturn Assembly legislation if it was deemed to be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Those provisions are there, as I said earlier, the dimmer switch has been applied to them really ever since the agreement. Now it faces real difficulties.

From someone in the SDLP negotiating team, what I recall is that John Hume's two lenses for looking at everything was through rights and relationships. The institutional arrangements were meant to be arrangements that could foster better relationships, both within the North and North-South, while also upholding rights. That was the idea. We may have presumed that getting the physics of the institutions right meant that the chemistry would happen by itself, but it has not and did not. However, it has done at times. The chemistry within the institutions even at times of difficulty has worked better. It would be wrong to say that the whole thing has been a disappointment or that things have gone wrong. It is just that something as good as the Good Friday Agreement, and as overwhelmingly endorsed as the Good Friday Agreement, needs better care, attention and respect, as far as adherence is concerned. There is this idea that we can let different parts of agreement go.

It is not just parties that let parts of the agreement go. Look how long the two Governments let the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference go without meeting. Why? There is no point in them calling themselves co-guarantors of the agreement if they are setting a pretty bad standard. This was not meeting at times when there were not the difficulties between the British and Irish Governments that there are now. It tended to be neglected. It kind of frightens the unionist horses. Unionists do not like the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference that much but that was not a good reason for not discharging the commitment and the agreement to meet every year to deal with non-devolved matters. The text of the agreement says that relevant Ministers from the Executive can be invited to those meetings. That is the way of assuring people that there is nothing wrong or that nothing untoward is going on. I would like to correct what I just said there now, I have said that the text of the agreement says that Ministers could come in. If we actually read the text of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference section of the agreement, paragraph seven does not actually use the term "Northern Ireland Ministers", because at the stage that it was written, there still was not agreement on Northern Ireland Ministers. Instead, the clunky language refers to those with executive authority representing the Northern Ireland administration. That was one of the clunky bits of language that was not caught in the final draft of the agreement.