Sir John Major:

Yes. Suppose we had reached a further agreement between London and Dublin on something and had not reached a comparable agreement with the other two strands. You can quite see how you would then get arguments that the Governments were operating behind their back, that they were not really interested in the internal government of the North or the relationship between North and South and were interested only in London and Dublin. For each of those strands, if you were to choose to agree one of them in isolation, you can see arguments that would have arisen which would imperil the overall agreement. That was why we wished to reassure people that we were not going to do anything behind their backs or drag them reluctantly in a direction in which they did not wish to go because we had reached some prior agreement.

It was an act of reassurance so the people we were negotiating with on each of the three strands realised they were not going to be dragged into a commitment that perhaps they had entered into reluctantly and then find the other two strands of the overall agreement did not apply. It was a form of reassurance and was necessary to keeping the talks going.