Mr. Wally Kirwan:

Senator Black is doing very important work with Ireland's Future. I was at the big event in 3 Arena not long back with 5,000 people, which certainly shows there is a considerable interest in the topic of Irish unity at the present time.

Deputy Brendan Smith and others said they hoped the witnesses wrote things down. With Parkinson's, I am unlikely to be writing down anything more but I had the opportunity to provide a long witness statement to Dundalk Institute of Technology, which is involved in a consortium. It is put away, as I mentioned, up to 2040. Nothing I said requires that long an embargo, but it is possibly required in other cases.

It has been a long road since I was in Derry on 5 October 1968. I had been away in Holland for a course for a period and I had a car which was getting rusted away in the salty sea air where I lived. When the civil rights march was forming up at the bridge in Derry, I was painting my car with rust primer. My late wife and her mother were participants in that march more on impulse and they had to take refuge in a chip shop to avoid getting their heads beaten in. Later that evening, I myself was at that risk at Butcher’s Gate but a couple of hefty men got me under the elbow and brought me to safety. That was where I started my involvement with Northern Ireland.

The Sunningdale agreement was supposed to have set up the council of Ireland, as members all know, and there was to be a joint secretary from the South and a joint secretary from the North, and a competition was held in the Civil Service for the position of joint secretary for the South. I was successful in that and I started work on it but, of course, as we know, the Sunningdale agreement did not last very long.

Those are just a few ways in which my path crossed people who are present or are members of the committee. I am ready to answer any questions or take any points that members want to raise.