Niall Blaney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is also a very good answer. I recognise what Dr. McKee said about economic equality. I spent two days in Belfast last week and in unionist and nationalist areas it is very obvious that governance on the ground and politics are not working given the amount of deprivation, unemployment, the sense of being lost and people having no sense that politicians will get them out of the current mess. With the cost of living, food banks have to do an awful lot of work on the ground to feed families and keep them above board. It is a trying time.

The reference Dr. McKee made to the Patten report is good, as were the lessons on how we got here. At the end of the day, all aspects of the Good Friday Agreement were not fully implemented. Perhaps we need to go back and examine why. One of the aspects of the Good Friday Agreement was decommissioning. This took a seven-year period.

What impact did the seven-year implementation period for decommissioning have on the level of trust that was there in 1998? Was it a factor in losing trust in the intervening years?