Lord Empey:

If the Chairman is still chairing this committee in 25 years, I will be very happy to accept his invitation to return.

Perhaps we can try to do the easy things first. It is not difficult to co-operate on economics. There is nobody or no public representatives I am aware of who are not prepared currently, by and large, to work together on economic issues. Surely there is merit in saying we can do something positive for our respective constituents. The agreement dealt with the constitutional issue, which removed the tension and the obstacles in the way of doing that. We have not exploited that.

Governments, unfortunately, in both capitals have messed around with the agreement because they wanted to try to tweak it to suit one particular group or another behind the backs of all of the rest of them. If the governments could do one thing it would be to stay out of it and to stop messing with it because the reason we are in a mess now, of course, is primarily Brexit related, and it is not a constitutional tension within the system of the Good Friday Agreement. It is because Brexit negotiations were so awful that we have ended up where we are. We do not yet know, as we are standing here today, how that is going to play out in the next few weeks. A point will come, however, when that becomes more clear.

I hope that, if we focus on using what we have to deliver what we can, there is always the scope to say that we did this successfully. We can do that and look at some other and additional areas. We can say we have done all we can in one area and we can move to another. There is an infinite amount of flexibility within the agreement if people are prepared to use it.

It seems to me that, for the next generations coming forward, looking at the choice between the type of community of those who shot the police officer in Omagh recently and made the threats, we must ask if we want that type of country or a country which has adhered to democratic standards. When we see the brutality that is unfolding in eastern Europe at the moment, that is something that most of us, I suspect, never thought we would see in our lifetimes. This should say to us in many respects that we are fortunate not to be living in that circumstance and that we have a way of doing things by using a democratic mechanism. We are under an obligation, after people have voted in a referendum, to deliver that. I have to say we are not doing that at the moment and the activities of governments over the years have not been particularly helpful.

That looks to the positive side of it where there is potential and I hope and pray we seize those opportunities and deliver on that potential. I thank the Chair and the committee very much for inviting me to its proceedings today.