H.E. Dr. Eamonn McKee:

I had a great trip to Newfoundland last May. When I was talking to a guy from Waterford, I discovered he was actually third generation Fogo Island but the Waterford accent could be cut with a knife. The connection is great. I would love to see that flight back. It is only about four and a half hours. The shortest distance across the great North Atlantic is between Newfoundland and Ireland. There is a brilliant UNESCO joint heritage project to commemorate the electric cable that was successfully dropped between Heart’s Content in Newfoundland and Valentia Island in County Kerry in 1866. It truly was the start of globalisation and globalised communication. We are working on a great project with the communities in Heart’s Content and Valentia Island to make it a UNESCO world heritage site. It is indicative of the connections between us. One of the joys of being in Canada has been discovering the Irish contribution to Canada, which is immense and very deep. It is a story that is not well known in Canada or even in Ireland. We have pursued some initiatives to demonstrate the depth of the Irish contribution. The Irish have been coming to Canada for three centuries.

I would support anything that reminds people of the Good Friday Agreement. I remind myself how old I am when I go back 25 years to those negotiations and back further. All of that is necessary because when we look back on the news footage from the 1970s and 1980s, we see how grim it all really was and how much change there has been for the good. We want to maintain that. I would say we need to return to the idealism of the Good Friday Agreement. While we have spoken a good deal about the pragmatism of it, I think there was a real sense of shared idealism about the future. I know that people like Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Ian Paisley and so on were motivated by creating a better future for their children. That is why they left old habits behind. That is why they felt that this was the time to make an agreement. We cannot foist this conflict on our children. We have to bear in mind that our generation’s responsibility is to build a future that is better than the past, and not to inflict these problems on our children. That was genuinely the motivating force among the political leadership.

We have not mentioned that Albert Reynolds was a key figure in this. The Downing Street Declaration of 1993 was an absolutely critical breakthrough. The architect of that was Seán O hUiginn. That essentially addressed the fundamental damage done by partition in not securing the sovereign will of the Irish people. That declaration was a very intensely thought-through formula that led directly to the IRA ceasefire the following year in 1994. It took a huge amount of effort, much of it driven by idealism about how to build a better future. If we use the opportunity of the Good Friday Agreement to remind people of the future we are looking for, we will realise that are looking for a future of equality, rights and justice and of people who can have a good living and have economic and educational opportunities throughout Northern Ireland and also down South.

It is instructive to look at various models. It has been argued that after 1922, we had a counter-revolutionary government in place for all kinds of good reasons, such as stability. However, being in Canada has made me think about the fact that we do not often talk about the damage of colonialism in the South. We do not often talk about its lasting legacies. One of the reasons we have such difficulty in getting a good health service is that the origins of our health service go back to the colonial period of direct but very indifferent rule from London for 120 years that allowed the role of the church to develop in health and education. We have not been very introspective in the South about the long legacies of colonialism. In a way, thinking about a united Ireland allows us to have that conversation and consider how to remedy some of those deficits and address some of the governance issues. I do not think you can have a debate about a united Ireland without having implications for the South. Arguably, you could say there are as many implications for the South as there are for the North. Going back to Dr. Mansergh’s original point, if you are talking about a united Ireland you are talking about building a new state.

I dealt with legacy a good deal in my time in the Anglo-Irish division. I was involved in the Cory process, which looked into allegations of collusion, the Saville inquiry and the Finucane case. This was always going to be a really difficult one. Part of the mindset of those of us involved in the Good Friday Agreement was that we were building for the future. We thought that if we got into a discussion around past narratives, or had a competition around past narratives, we were never going to go anywhere. However, that did not mean we could leave those issues behind. We had to deal with those issues. I would say that myself and my colleagues in the Irish Government in general have been very much to the fore in looking for truth and particularly justice for the victims of violence in Northern Ireland, including victims of state violence in Northern Ireland.

I will not comment directly on the current legacy proposals but we must be very mindful of the rule of law and justice and the need for it to be victim-centred in a way that is principled and based in human rights law.