Sir John Major:

I thank Senator Currie for those generous comments. It is kind of her to be so generous.

There are quite a few points there that the Senator picks up. First, I apologise for the length of that opening statement. If it is any consolation to the Senator, when I wrote an initial draft it was two-and-a-half times longer than the statement I delivered because there were all sorts of things that were relevant to setting the atmosphere that were in many cases never public in terms of problems, either with the unionists, with the British parliamentarians or with disagreements in parts of the negotiating with the Irish Government - their frustration sometimes with us - or all sorts of things there that at one stage or another could have been the end of negotiations.

Senator Currie was quite right to draw attention to the importance of the late Albert Reynolds and John Bruton. We were often frustrated but felt we had to continue. I dare say, so were they. They were often frustrated too, both with us and also with the Provisionals.

The feeling I had about violence was clear. I met some victims from time to time and I could see what it had done to their lives. When one hears that five people have been killed, it is a statistic. When one meets the family of one of those people and one realises the ripple effect of misery that spreads out from one act of violence towards one person, one realises the scale of difficulty. It scarred the whole way of life in Ireland, in the North, and had its ripple effect in the South as well. It was, quite frankly, just intolerable to contemplate that that could go on.

I was shocked, as I indicated rightly in the early part of my remarks, that there was no regular meeting between Irish Ministers and British Ministers before the early 1990s. Ireland is our nearest neighbour. We have a chequered history. There are many things that one might wish were different in the past - perhaps a bit on both sides but, certainly, I can see that on the British side - but a different relationship was built up through and after the peace process and we need that continue. Senator Currie asked specifically about that. You cannot build up that relationship unless you meet together, unless you talk together, unless you trade together, unless you work together and unless you share a similar outlook, and in so many ways Ireland and the United Kingdom have a similar outlook. All through government, not only on matters related to Northern Ireland, we really need a more in-depth relationship with Ireland, in my view. I am no longer in Parliament but, were I to be so and were I in a position to judge it, I would say that we needed to maximise the relationship with our nearest neighbour because that is in our British interest as well as the Irish interest. It is very important that that happens.

It would help a great deal too if we could have an executive that was functioning in the North as well because there is a responsibility on politicians who are elected to deal with problems. I do not only mean the problems of the Northern Ireland protocol but, plainly, they will have to reach an accommodation of some sort.

However, the Executive is not meeting and there are all sorts of other political problems in the North, including those relating to the health and education services. It is very important that every effort be made to solve the problem of the protocol, perhaps the result of one of the least well-done negotiations in modern history, and ensure that problem ceases to be an inhibitor to the Executive meeting.

The Senator mentioned the bad moments of the peace process, normally after an atrocity of some sort, and why the process continued. It continued largely for this reason: after the murder of those two little boys who were buying Easter presents for their parents in Warrington - a bomb in a bin killed them - it would have been easy to stop the peace process. Many people thought the smack of firm government would result in its being said that we are not going to deal with these people anymore, but there is a reverse to that. If that smack of firm government had taken place and we had decided not to deal with the Provisional IRA anymore, the violence would have gone on and more little boys and others would have been subjected to the same sort of violence. It was possible to get behind the violence. Remember that the purpose of the process was to end the violence, which did mean that, if I may give a quote attributed to a very great British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, "jaw, jaw is better than war, war". We needed to continue to try to get the negotiations or party talks on track and the peace process to continue. I apologise for the length of that reply but the Senator raised a number of different points.