Lord Alderdice:

The questions are very much related to each other, as Dr. Farry says. We have to be a little careful about our expectations of reconciliation because, in truth, that is about how people feel about each other and engage with each other. I am pretty cautious about the expectations of reconciliation if we understand that in a powerful and fundamental way as distinct from simply accepting we have to live together in a community that may have diverse perspectives in it.

When it comes to reform, we are in an easier place to speak about it - maybe not easier to deliver, but an easier place to speak about it. As Dr. Farry might recall, in the governing with consent document, we took the view that the best way of getting agreement on the formation of the Executive was a weighted majority. In that document it was 70%. When it came to the talks process, I pushed very hard to get a weighted majority of 67% because I felt that would ensure you had to get cross-community support. No one community could get 67%, so cross-community support was necessary. What it would do would be to encourage politicians on one side of the community, as we used to talk about, to try to win the support of people on the other side of the community.

The problem I could see with the proposition John Hume was very wedded to of a majority of unionists, a majority of nationalists, and a majority of the whole was that it encouraged party leaders on one side of the community to appeal to the people on their own side and leaders on the other side of the community to appeal to people on their side. Although John wanted to see things coming together and, frankly, I think, could not foresee a situation where the SDLP was not the largest nationalist party and the Ulster Unionist Party, UUP, was not the largest unionist party, there was in fact a dynamic built into that which was polarising in its nature. That is why I did not want to go down that particular road. I well remember, and I do not believe this has been a matter of public record before, a conversation with David Trimble after he had decided to go along with John's proposal where he was somewhat in two minds as to whether it was the best way forward. I suspect he and John thought theirs would be the two largest parties and they could probably divvy up the Alliance Party vote between them. What actually happened was something quite radically different. Given the new situation we are in, a radically different position in terms of support for the Alliance Party, the SDLP and the UUP, returning to the kind of proposition - not every item of it - we had been making for a long time of a weighted majority as the best way of reaching across the community divide in the establishment of an Executive is something people ought to be getting back to looking at again 25 years later. I do not believe the Good Friday Agreement is the law of the Medes and Persians. It needs to evolve and change as the situation changes if it is going to remain a worthwhile way forward, not just in terms of reform but in the longer term, we fervently hope, in respect of the reconciliation to which Dr. Farry referred in the first part of his comment.