Mr. Gerry Adams:

First of all, I do not think that was the issue that damaged David Trimble. What damaged David Trimble was the unwillingness of sections of his party to engage with the process, which he had bravely and courageously decided to go for. What he had done, and this was written about at the time, if not at the time of the Good Friday Agreement then the years close behind it, and he said it himself, was that he realised there had to be change. The demographics were changing, the nationalist position was becoming stronger and it could not continue as before. They had to shape out a new dispensation. Others would not accept that. When you are reared on, "not an inch," "no surrender," "what we have, we hold," and "we are the people," that is a very hard position to come to and negotiate from. That is what David Trimble was faced with. Of course, it would have been better if all the arms had been gotten rid of. Of course that would have been better. Would it have been better if there had been no war? Of course. All of these things are true. However, this was used, and if it had not been that issue, some other issue would have been used.

It needs to be remembered that while this matter of the republican army, the IRA, and its weapons is the focus here, it took a long time to get demilitarisation done. It took a long time to get Brits off the street and off people's necks. There are unionist paramilitary groups still in place. The IRA has gone. There are still loyalist paramilitary groups in place in the North. They are still carrying out actions. There was despicable stuff there recently about loan sharking, and they are heavily involved in the drug trade and all that craic.

It would have been better had all these issues been dealt with expeditiously. All I can say is that we could do it no better than we were able to do it. We made our position clear, that there needed to be a peace process, that there needed to be the type of changes that were part of the Good Friday Agreement, and so on. We had no truck with it. We wanted all of these organisations to disappear. We did the best we could in the course of very difficult and challenging times. Thankfully, it worked.

As I said earlier, getting to the Good Friday Agreement took an awfully long time and I am surprised about how long it took. It is still not fully implemented now, 25 years later. The Irish Government signed up for a charter of rights and we still do not have one a quarter of a century later. Other measures that the Government here signed up to have not been put in place. I do not want to repeat myself, but whatever it was possible to do to resolve the issue presented by arms in republican hands was dealt with as expeditiously, as quickly, as efficiently and as speedily as it could have been done.