Mr. Gerry Adams:

I think I have already answered that in terms of my position on how long it took. Here is the rub, and this is my big thing, but I think I can prove it. The plan of the Irish Government, the British Government, and indeed the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP leadership, was that the SDLP and the Ulster Unionist Party would go into government. They would govern the place. That was their plan. The agreement would not have been as deep and penetrating in terms of all the issues that needed to be dealt with. That did not happen. Once the thread was pulled, it became obvious there were some people who just did not want to share power. That was David Trimble's problem. He had made the courageous leap.

Remember, we negotiated the Good Friday Agreement and not one unionist leader, outside of those I bumped into in the men's room, said a word to me or to any of the Sinn Féin delegation, nor did they engage with the Sinn Féin delegation or exchange papers with them. Not one of them. The loyalists, on the other hand, were very upfront. The first time we met, they stuck out their hands and shook hands. I think it was because of their working-class backgrounds and so on. They were not caught up in the pretentiousness that some people have, what used to be called big house unionism. There were all of those difficulties in it. The committee members might recall, having seen it on television, that when I nominated Martin McGuinness as Minister for Education, cries of horror came from the unionist bench. Yet Martin McGuinness was duly elected officially, the same as the Senator or anybody else.

What was a huge difficulty, and I appreciate it is mighty difficult, and even yet Jeffrey Donaldson will face this challenge in the time ahead, is to try to bring those elements of unionism that will not face up to the reality that change is happening and is ongoing and we can all live together. We disagree with each other and we do what we do in this institution, which is to fight and argue and debate, but that is where it stays. It is oral or it is verbal. It can be as passionate as people want, it can be as determined as people want, or it can be as awkward as people feel, but they will not come to terms with this. I think they will. That is my view. We just have to be persistent, strategic, stay united and close down all the negative options so that people see positive options. That has been accelerated, incidentally, by Brexit and other developments since then, but there is a huge challenge for unionist leaders to face up to this. Jeffrey Donaldson knows that, by the way. He knows what the future is. His challenge is, as a Mourne man and someone who says he has been here for hundreds of years and will never leave, is to make this a better place for everyone.