H.E. Dr. Eamonn McKee:

We need to remember that before we get to the unity question, we should take it in sequence. Unity is preceded by a shift in sovereignty from London to Dublin. That is what it means, in effect. There is no particular provision for how that is done but if we assume there is a vote on a united Ireland, the first thing that has to happen is for London to agree to cede sovereignty to Dublin. We would then face the fundamental question of whether we dismantle Northern Ireland in terms of its parliament and what would we do with the PSNI, its health service and so on. That is the first question. If we decide - it is a big “If” - that Northern Ireland is going to keep its local parliament, one then has to think about whether that means Leinster, Munster and Connacht get their own provincial parliaments, with a national government in Dublin. One question leads on to another about precisely what we would do when London hands sovereignty over to Dublin. We have to figure out in governance terms how we create stability around that process once it is under way.

To go back to the point on decommissioning to which Dr. Mansergh referred, there was an intrinsic connection between decommissioning and policing. Conflict is about the break-up of the moral monopoly on violence that normally resides in the state. The nation state is built around the idea that the use of violence is the right of a government through the police and the army. That social contract broke down in Northern Ireland from 1969 onwards. What the conflict was basically about was that the state had lost the moral monopoly on violence. Of course, that was deeply etched by what happened on Bloody Sunday, but also what happened thereafter, when the Lord Chief Justice of Britain said that the victims were themselves guilty and so on. There was no rule of law. The peace process was about returning the monopoly of violence to the state; to the police and the army. The retention of weapons by the IRA was, in a way, a position of reserve. The position was that in the experiment in respect of a peace process and creating a Northern Ireland that could be accepted and in which people could live, it would be a case of seeing how it goes. As the Patten commission proceeded and as policing was being implemented, there was then a fundamental question of having to return to the PSNI and the British Army and their moral monopoly on violence.

The two processes of decommissioning and policing were intrinsically linked and so when the republican movement decommissioned its weapons, that was it saying it was happy and had confidence in policing, being accountable and so on and so forth. Those issues were interlocked. As the years went by when we were working through this process, there was no alternative. When I came back from the negotiations in Belfast, I talked to Seán Ó hUiginn and said that I was not sure we could simultaneously create the conditions for power sharing while also changing Northern Ireland by, for example, dismantling the RUC and introducing the PSNI. Mr. Ó hUiginn said that was not the time for the speculative paper and we should just work it through. He was right to give that advice.

Dr. Mansergh referred to the sceptics. Just after the Good Friday Agreement, I visited Northern Ireland and met some republican contacts in a hotel. One of them had a live round and threw it across the table at me and said, "Tell Dublin that is the only effing decommissioning they are ever going to see." They were underlining the point that decommissioning was not something we were going to see earlier. I remember taking that back to Dermot Gallagher, who said the republicans were going to decommission because they had to. Mr. Gallagher, Mr. Paddy Teahan and Mr. Tim Dalton, who we dubbed the "Three Amigos", were absolutely on the front line in advancing the decommissioning issue.

The republican movement realised the value of decommissioning and that the achievement of decommissioning was an absolute goal of the British Government and an absolute requirement for unionism. We got delivery on some of the early agreements for implementing the Good Friday Agreement through the leverage of decommissioning. That was characteristic of the process for many years.

I also underline the point that in terms of the implementation of the agreement, the SDLP, particularly Mr. Alex Attwood, Mr. Brian Barrington and people like them, and Mr. Seamus Mallon, were absolutely key to the forensic details of implementing changes in the Good Friday Agreement, particularly in justice and policing. They did an outstanding job in that regard, as well as providing the strategic overview. All of those issues underline the size of the issues we were trying to wrestle to the ground.