Dr. Stephen Farry:

I want to raise issues around sovereignty and to make reference to Sir. John's work in terms of the European Union. I will start with Peter Brooke's comments with regard to the UK having no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland and how significant that statement was. To what extent did Sir. John appreciate the complexities around sovereignty in the context of Northern Ireland, in terms of it being part of the UK but also the wider interests on the island of Ireland and the different constitutional aspirations?

Sir John may not have realised at the time how important his work on advancing European integration actually was, in terms of the consolidation of the work on the Single Market and the Maastricht treaty. I do not want to get into that issue too much in terms of difficult backbenchers but that work was very helpful in breaking down borders on the island of Ireland. While it was not explicit in the Good Friday Agreement, it did provide the backdrop to it in terms of allowing borders to wither away. Was that purely a parallel strand or was there any awareness of how significant that work would, in due course, be for trying to break down barriers within the island of Ireland?

To move on to more contemporary times, Sr. John Major and Mr. Tony Blair famously came to Derry-Londonderry in the run-up to the Brexit referendum and expressed concerns about the potential implications of the vote on a society such as Northern Ireland, which really works through sharing and interdependence. Was he disappointed at that time that his successors did not pay enough attention to the implications of Brexit for the complexities of Northern Ireland? Are there lessons to be learned from that?

Those are my three questions for Sir John.