Senator George Mitchell:

The agreement was reached in April 1998 and approved in a referendum in May 1998. Nearly a year later, on 16 July, if my memory is correct, the Northern Ireland Assembly collapsed. The two prime ministers and President Clinton called and asked me if I would return to Northern Ireland to try to put the process back on track.

I did and I spent several months there. The negotiations at the time were narrow, involving primarily the Ulster Unionist Party and Sinn Féin. For several weeks we struggled to make progress without much success and then someone made a suggestion - it may have been David Trimble, Gerry Adams or both. They said to me that it was very difficult for them and their party members. As some members may recall, the meetings took place in a government office building in Stormont and there was a fence surrounding the building with a single entrance through a gate. The media tended to congregate just outside the gate and to understandably pepper those arriving in the morning and going out in the evening with questions, challenges and comments.

It was creating difficulties in the discussions. It was an issue, as it was during the main talks themselves, trying to balance two valid objectives in a democratic society - freedom of the press and the right of the public to know, which is a valid objective of course, on the one hand, and the necessity for some discussions to take place completely in private on the other, as otherwise it would be impossible to reach agreement on controversial and contested issues such as those before us.

They asked that I consider convening a series of meetings outside Stormont. I consulted the two governments. Some renovations on the US ambassador's residence in London had just been completed. It is a large and very nice building. I arranged for us to go there. We spent about a week before the press found us and we got quite a bit accomplished during that week. I was able to establish some degree of communication between members of the two parties who had previously not communicated very well. We ultimately returned to Belfast and were able to complete a process of putting the agreement back on track. As I said, it was a one-off situation which worked in that instance. It is impossible to say to what degree the isolation helped. However, I think it helped somewhat and contributed to putting the process back together. I do not think it would be possible to conduct a full negotiation, such as the two years that we spent at Stormont working on the principal agreement in that way.