Mr. Gerry Adams:

The Deputy could be right and we ended up with a qualified position having got clarification, and it helped to move the peace process forward, but my main point, if I can put it like this, is that the London Government is a unionist government. The London Government is about holding the union.

My main point is that the London government is a unionist government. The London government is about upholding the union. They might not have any great personal commitment to, or any love for, it but that is its position. Is the Irish Government a pro end-of-union Government? Is it a pro-unity Government? Is the Irish Government in any way working towards a strategy to bring about that very legitimate objective? I am sure all of us in this committee and all of the Members in this Dáil will agree that we would all be better off if we were all living together on the one island, self-governing ourselves in whatever way the people wanted. We would be friends of the British. I do not hate the British. We could all be friends together and have wonderful relationships between these islands but that will only happen when an Irish Government decides that is, as the Constitution points out, a policy objective and it then starts to develop strategies and other approaches to bring it about.

The big challenge at the moment is outreach to unionism. For me as a Belfast person living with unionist neighbours, that is the big challenge, as it is for all of our colleagues here. We now have the position, and we should not fall into the mistake of saying that the Downing Street Declaration was better than this. The fact is we now have a position that if a majority of people decide that the union should end, the union will end. Do we think that is a good thing? Does our Constitution put that in as an imperative or an obligation on a government? Let us get our act together, folks. Let us try to put all these other differences we have to one side and try to figure out the best way, the peaceful, democratic way of doing it, to unite the country and the people. We are now back to where Tone was; it is about bringing Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter together. That is what we are back to, all these 200 hundred years later.