Mr. Mark Durkan:

The shared island unit is a positive development. As with other areas, some of the unionist parties have taken issue with it. I can understand that in one sense because the phrase "shared island" was one of the phrases that we discussed during the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement in terms of what the name of the North-South arrangement would be. They said "No" to "Council of Ireland", "No" to "Irish Council of Ministers", "No" to "Shared Island Council", etc. Some of them may be going back to that.

It is not just the unit that is important, but also the fund. The shared island fund has been able to cut through the drag factors that have kept back many worthy projects that people have agreed and endorsed down the years. I am referring to projects that appeared in all sorts of planning documents but never happened. The shared island fund has been a positive addition. A number of years ago, I made the observation that the trick we missed with the Good Friday Agreement in setting up strand two - the ministerial council, defined areas of co-operation and implementation bodies, as if implementation bodies were going to be the highest form of North-South life - was in not creating an all-Ireland version of the European Structural Fund. Unionists do not like structures and bodies, but they do not mind funds. Who does? This could be built into any review and we could draw lessons from the positive experience of the shared island fund and, at a lesser and sometimes more localised level, the experience of the peace and reconciliation fund. The Department of Foreign Affairs's peace and reconciliation fund has very good cross-community reach in the North for the precise reasons that the Acting Chairperson has mentioned. That helps to build assurance and acceptance by everyone of the relevance and benevolent interest of the Irish Government. The shared island fund helps to enable activities. I am conscious that, when the Taoiseach established the shared island unit, he stated that it would not be in the business of dealing with the unity debate. As such, we must be careful about creating difficulties in that regard. I can see why people want to keep those strands carefully delineated, but there are positive lessons to take from the shared island fund.

It would be good if, in a future review of the NSMC, we could agree longer term funding arrangements or structures, for example, a mini-version of the EU's funds. At the final plenary session of the NSMC before the institutions were suspended in 2002, we agreed that capital investment and infrastructure plans North and South could come to it for joint consideration. That is something that Mr. David Trimble agreed to and signed off on as a possible development of the NSMC's agenda. He was interested in North-South projects like the Ulster Canal, which would have benefited from such funding.

It goes back to what I said earlier. We need to recapture some of what we were trying to do before, but also learn from some of the good ideas that have developed since.