Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Ahern for coming today and for his undeniable contribution to peace and progress on this island. As he has said himself, the progress that has been made is remarkable. In my view, all roads lead back to the values of Good Friday Agreement, no matter what the future holds. For us, this project is about really getting under the hood of the Good Friday Agreement 25 year later and looking at the good, the bad and the ugly from where we are at the moment. There is lots of good and lots of bad and there has been lots of ugly too. I have a few questions and I will try to be as quick as I can.

A lot of attention has been focused on what happened after the women's football team's success a few weeks ago. It is an awful pity for them that their success has been overshadowed but in my view, it reflects on where we are 25 years on from the Good Friday Agreement and the lack of progress when it comes to reconciliation or the understanding of it. To me, reconciliation is about empathy for other views, situations, backgrounds and history. Where does Mr. Ahern believe we are in relation to that side of reconciliation? I do not want to focus on what happened with the women's football team. On where we are and people's mindsets around reconciliation, does he think we need to have a conversation about what reconciliation actually means? It strikes me that people have different perceptions of what reconciliation means and that is a problem in itself. Not only are people coming from different viewpoints about what might have happened in the past but now we have new generations with different understandings of reconciliation. Do we need to have a conversation about that?

The former Taoiseach mentioned the St. Andrews Agreement. People point to that agreement as a reason for there being entrenched silos in Stormont. When Mr. Ahern was working on the agreement, did he anticipate that? Would he change the agreement at this moment in time? Through this process, I have come to see that the Good Friday Agreement was never supposed to be about putting all of our eggs into one basket in respect of power sharing but about working the three strands equally, like the three legs of a stool they are. Has it become apparent, since Brexit, that we just did not invest in those strands enough for that stool to stand as firm as possible?

We talk about the relationships with the British Government and their importance but fundamentally, the UK is on a different path to us at the moment. It is on a path that is about deregulation, divergence and disintegration, rather than convergence. How does the former Taoiseach see the relationship developing on that basis?

Finally, if social media had been around at the time of the Good Friday Agreement, would we have had it?