Senator George Mitchell:

As I said in my opening remarks, I am most affected by and influenced by the consequences of the agreement as opposed to a specific provision of it, and those are the dramatic reduction in violence and the resort to democratic and peaceful means as a democratic form of governance. My answer to the Senator's specific question is really just bringing it to an end. It is hard for me to describe to the committee the difficulty of the nearly two years preceding that agreement. I said on many occasions we had 700 days of failure and one day of success. It was extraordinarily difficult to keep going in the face of repeated failure, unyielding negativity and unwillingness even to listen to the other side. It was an experience unlike any I had ever been exposed to and it was hard to keep going and hard to stay positive. That is what I tried to do, and I tried to keep open what at first seemed non-existent but later became a lane of opportunity through which the parties could pass to get an agreement. Rather than any specific provision, it is the agreement itself overall and mostly an end to the Troubles that had hung so heavily over the people of Northern Ireland in the preceding decades.