Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Ahern for coming in. We are very pleased to have him in and I thank him for the work he did.

A normal amount of spats is the normal type of politics Mr. Ahern and others were aiming to achieve in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, instead of what was there. He has said clearly the primary goal for him and for the British Government was stopping the violence in the first instance and building a set of structures that would enable reconciliation in particular. We get this sense from the conversations we have had over the last while that stopping the violence was a primary goal, as was reaching an agreement and that you must stop somewhere, as in you must stop talking and reach agreement at some point. Recognising that time pressure, was there anything else Mr. Ahern feels could have been brought in or is there anything he regrets about that stop point?

Linked to that is this question of reconciliation. Mr. Ahern has this morning described people straining every fibre of their being to try to reach a resolution with people they did not even want to be in the same room with. One of the fears we have, in particular the way the politics is constructed, is that it is directly contrary to reconciliation. It deliberately pulls people to the poles as opposed to the centre. The opportunities, as Senator McGreehan was talking about, for integrated education as the norm and for cultural reconciliation as integration becomes more and more normalised over a period of 25 years, do not seem to have happened in the way people hoped or expected they might. What is Mr. Ahern's view of how reconciliation has gone over that period? Does he have a view on how the politics is constructed and how the institutions are constructed and whether that enables or hinders reconciliation in any way?