Mr. Mark Durkan:

I am not an actuary so I do not know for how long everyone in this room will live. Yes, or I certainly think that we have to plan responsibly and carefully for it so that all of the issues that need to be appraised are properly addressed. I do not think that will be a short exercise. It will involve layers of inter-party discussion, layers of public engagement and different channels of expert consideration feeding back into public debate and back into inter-party discussions. Most of the ideas that are in the Good Friday Agreement did not begin in the negotiations on the Good Friday Agreement. Most of them were there based on and written into layers of understanding or if not written in at least discussed when we were having various talks between parties. That includes the Brooke-Mayhew talks and the Hume-Adams talks. It goes back to the New Ireland Forum, it includes the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation and all sorts of Anglo-Irish negotiations that went on between officials. We need to do that work now. We cannot leave it until somebody decides that the criteria have been met to call a poll and then people are not ready to put forward a clear, coherent proposition in a credible way. We also need to design that conversation so that it is actually about reconciliation.

One of the fulfilments of reconciliation under the agreement would be if we could have a safe, healthy debate on the choice of constitutional status for the North where people were not worried that the fact of having a referendum was jeopardising the agreement and people were assured that in either outcome the promises in terms of rights and protections that the agreement affords would still stand. We need to do that, so I do not buy the argument that it somehow upsets or distracts from the reconciliation agenda to discuss the question of constitutional change. We need to look at how we can have a healthy debate with honest differences over honest preferences where each side is going to have to take its chance.