Lord Empey:

The Senator goes to the heart of it in the sense that the run-up to the mid-1990s has to be remembered and the fact that we had been going through two and half decades of terrorist activity at that time. That obviously has a huge impact on political relationships. People were losing friends. We lost quite a number of very prominent elected party members. Rev. Robert Bradford was obviously one but there were many others who were killed and injured such as councillors, Assembly members and so on. We must remember that there were interactions at local government. I was in local government for many years and councillors were there from all parties; that was the case from the early 1980s. It was not friendship but you knew people as they progressed further up their respective parties. It was not the case that there was no communication but it was very strained and could sometimes get to breaking point. Having been through all of that, and I think of the time around the Enniskillen bombing and so on, I was a member of the Belfast City Council and there were enormous tensions at subsequent meetings. It was only really in the mid-1990s that we came up with the idea that we could try to work on economic issues together in local government. We certainly did that in Belfast. That gave everybody the opportunity to at least do something positive for their constituents without any political issues to confront them. Everybody wanted to do something to improve the lot of their constituents but which did not require any significant political sacrifices or arguments over wider national issues. That was one mechanism I found helped lay the foundations for at least the ability to recognise there was at least one area of common ground upon which we could build. Sadly, that is the area we have largely neglected since. There has not been as much emphasis on that as I think there could have been. If we move forward to the time of devolution, in the posts that are held in the Government, I had the opportunity to establish InterTradeIreland, with my Dublin counterpart, and we also established Tourism Ireland with another Minister. Those were bodies that worked quite well.

We also did things that went outside the framework of the cross-Border bodies. I did a lot of work on energy. We did the South-North gas pipeline, which was quite a big deal, and the electricity interconnector with then Minister for Public Enterprise, Mary O'Rourke. There were things we could do that were in our mutual interests and which did not have a political baggage with them. Who does not want a gas supply? Who does not want an electricity supply that is reliable and affordable? I rather suspect that if we spent a lot more time on that sort of thing, the other issues with which we keep poking on another's eyes out, should perhaps take a bit of a back seat.