Lord Empey:

It was going to be an Act of parliament that was effectively designed around one individual. It indicated that the government in London had a very narrow perspective of what has been happening here.

Regarding reform, my personal opinion is that, because it is an all-party agreement, it should not have been interfered with without all-party agreement and, therefore, the starting point is what we negotiated and what was ratified by the people. As far as I am concerned, if you are going to move away from that – nothing can be set in stone forever – then you have to do it in a proper, constructive way instead of as part of a backstairs deal. There are plenty of backstairs deals, of which the double jobbing was one example. It was done to try to help one particular individual and one particular party to manage its internal affairs. The fact that a department of state would have as its mentality that this was a good thing to do is the most worrying aspect of the situation. It is more worrying than the proposed measure itself. We managed to see it off and it had to be withdrawn, but that took a great deal of effort that should never have been made at all. Time was wasted on it.

Like Mr. Ahern said on Monday, I take the view that the institutions should be made to work and, if we need to alter them, let us do it as we go along. However, if people are going to start a major "Good Friday Agreement Mk. II", they should not forget that we elected a Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, out of which the negotiating teams were drawn so that they would have an electoral mandate. There was then a complicated numerical mechanism as to how decisions were made and thresholds had to be reached. If we went back into now, I do not know how we would ever see the end of it. Given the level of poverty and the pressures that people are under, particularly young people after Covid, having had large parts of their school and student experiences wiped out – this still has many implications that we have not got our heads around yet – I cannot think of anything that would do more damage at this stage than if we started drilling down into what to do and how to form this or that committee, getting on to the constitutional issues, opening up the Irish Constitution, etc. Let us work with what we have and try to fix it as we go along, if that is required.

We can have all the rules, regulations and so forth in the world, but they will not make that much difference unless there is the political will to do it and to work for the betterment of our constituents. People have their long-term constitutional aspirations – there is nothing wrong with that; we all have them and we are entitled to them – but to start another head-to-head on the matter at the moment would be an extremely bad move.