Mr. Bertie Ahern:

As Mr. Brady knows, I am very involved with the George Mitchell institute in Queen's University Belfast and spend a lot of time there. I am up and down there like a yo-yo. I hear the views of all sectors. I definitely feel that on the ground people are frustrated, want solutions and want to move forward. They see the benefits of the Good Friday Agreement and the protocol. They readily admit there might be issues with the protocol that need to be addressed. Nobody wants people having to do eight pages of checks. We have to be realistic. These issues can be resolved. Business, trade unions and civic society in the North are certainly anxious. From what I detect, nobody particularly wants an election, certainly not in Christmas week, unless they are all mad and I do not think they are. It would not solve a lot either, for that matter. It is a case of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We might get a few changes here and there but will it fundamentally change where we are? I do not think so. Mr. Brady is correct. People in society generally want to see progress and compromise.

I will go back to the point I made in my opening remarks. I am the first to say that despite the success of the Good Friday Agreement and the peace and progress it has brought, it has not reached its full potential. We all know that but of all the things that were achieved, the agreement was achieved because people who were of different views and who did not particularly like each other, for understandable reasons no matter what side they came from, were prepared to compromise and prepared to find the middle ground on the basis of goodwill. That is still necessary. The only way things will be resolved, as people in this House know, is by people talking, discussing, deliberating and trying to find solutions. If people do not sit down to talk, we will not find solutions. That is my worry. The success of what we collectively did 25 years ago, and for the ten years after that in dealing with these issues, was the fact that we worked together. It did not mean we all loved each other and we all agreed and so on, but people genuinely tried very hard. People stretched themselves, especially our northern colleagues, and worked extremely hard to carry people with them to find ways of doing that. We still need that, which is the big challenge as we go into the years ahead.