Lord Alderdice:

I would go back to something which John Hume repeatedly said. It was one of a number of important pieces of political progress that were brought about by John Hume with the language he developed. The point he repeatedly made in public and in private was that it was not about uniting territory; it was about bringing people together. It was about uniting people. In a way, we have sort of slipped back a bit from that into talking about borders, polls, territory, institutions and all those kinds of things. All of those things are important, but fundamentally it is about how you bring people to have a relationship with each other. John Hume repeatedly spoke about that, absolutely rightly. It had a positive influence on how people thought about these things. It is not about a united Ireland in terms of the territory; it is about how you bring the people who live on the island of Ireland to a place where they can have a shared view of what the future should look like. That is the key thing. John Hume emphasised that. I remember that when he was talking about his talks with the IRA, he said he had asked them what they wanted, and they had said they wanted a united Ireland. When he told them to look at the map and see that it is one island, they said "Yes, yes, yes but there is a Border". He made the point to them that what the Border tells us is that the people who live on the island cannot agree how to share it, so we have to get agreement on how to share it. That is what the Good Friday Agreement was about. That sharing bit - that relationship bit of the people or peoples - is the key thing. We should not let go of that. We should not forget about that.