Professor Peter Shirlow:

There is always hope or alcohol, but hopefully both. We have been through a difficult time but let us go back to something. I remember at the time of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and before that that republicans said they would never sit in a devolved assembly and they would never accept the principle of consent. Unionists sad they would never accept reform of policing and power-sharing and issues like that. With the benefit of ageing, the long term is the way. This is what happened with the protocol. Professor Phinnemore spoke about checks and balances, so let us run it and see what happens. Checks and balances kick in, etc. We never got there. That was one of the fundamental problems because what we started off with was no hard border and what we ended up with was no sea border. Those are important points. Those ideologies never allowed us to build this into the ecosystem of Northern Ireland. There was a big opportunity here, although I do not want to rehearse this again, for a customs union and customs tariff. The Taoiseach's initiative, the shared island initiative, is brilliant. This can build capacities and make the types of changes we need to build. I sat on the group that handed out grants for the North-South universities. It was just perfect, in that at Queen's University, they had the technology while in the Republic of Ireland, they had the network. In the Republic of Ireland, they had the idea while in Queen's or the Ulster University, they had the practical experience, which is the very thing we need to be building and doing.

Going back to the Tory Party, we would hope this is the end of the populist-type rhetoric. It has damaged the country. It is interesting when one looks at the surveys that many of those who voted for Brexit would not do so now. There is that realisation and there has been the debacle of the Truss government. It is a party that is not in the position that it was in. How it recovers will not be by going down the rabbit hole of Brexit and the European Research Group, ERG. There are clearly people who have sat in the wings waiting during the various machinations of the party. Some 80 ministers and whips have resigned this year and we still have another couple of weeks to go, so we could get up to 100 yet. The realities of that are very clear. That has been something that has hit the skids. The Prime Minister has come in with a different scenario and approach but that does not mean that we will get the right outcome. In terms of all of this populism, Trump got a bit of a dent last night as well.

These things run into the practicalities of the outcomes. When we think about the Good Friday Agreement and people not signing up to things, if they signed up to things, they would create a much more stable, normal society. As for Brexit, people wanting this and that and wanting to take their country back has lead to this instability. It can work both ways.

Clearly the Conservative Party will be concentrating very strongly on winning an election. Hopefully, that cannot be through this excessive type of politics. It goes back to the point all of us made today that whatever comes out has to be sold. This is the most imaginative moment we need to create here because this is the last roll of the dice for the Assembly. It cannot go on like this. You cannot continually go back to an electorate with election after election. It will not build the stability we need. It is as important as that. Therefore, this deal has to be better than the Good Friday Agreement.

The Good Friday Agreement allowed us all our identities. It was like a box of chocolates in that some people liked macaroons while some people liked Brazil nuts. It was a confection. People voted for the Good Friday Agreement because they wanted the conflict to end. It is in the paper I have written but the fundamental problem here is that the Assembly has to have the confidence to start having mature debates about inter-dependencies and building a new economy. It has to get into that space. That is what is critically important here.