Sir John Major:

There is one thing I missed in my response to the Deputy's first question, which I might add, in terms of an unconventional approach. It is probably unconventional for politicians to work with the church to deliver something, but Albert, John and I used the churches sometimes as an interlocutor to reassure people that we were offering a true bill and that what we were saying to them was true and would be honoured. Certainly, the churches in the North did that for me on a number of occasions, and I believe they may have done it in the South as well. That certainly was a little unconventional.

What I meant by the last line of my statement is that I do not think anybody with an ideological opposition to anything to do with the protocol or anything else should fail to understand the wider significance of what happens if the protocol problem is not sorted out, if there were to be movements under Article 16 to disapply parts of the protocol. I do not think an ideological concern about sovereignty would justify that because the sovereignty point, in terms of the extent to which it is applied in the Northern Irish question on trade, is semantic, frankly. I meant things like that. I do not think anybody on the extreme fringes of politics should be in a position to wreck what has been brought together by the mainstream of politics. That was exactly what I was implying, that I did not think anybody, whatever his or her personal concerns might be, had a moral right to break apart the Good Friday Agreement and put us at risk of returning, if only partially, to the Troubles that existed before the Good Friday Agreement was finally signed.