Mr. Pat Hynes:

On behalf of the Glencree centre, I thank the Cathaoirleach and the committee members for affording us the opportunity to come before the committee as part of the reflection on the 25 years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.

It is perhaps not unreasonable to say that the agreement and the process that led to it during the early and mid-1990s represented one of the more important achievements in modern Irish diplomacy, involving politicians, officials, groups and their representatives who were party to the conflict. It exemplified a level of statecraft and co-ordination among Irish, US, and British political leaders not witnessed up to that point in the agreement when it was signed a quarter of a century ago. The peace process and the political environment against which the agreement was forged was akin to a complex ecosystem of interlocking interests and challenges among political leaders, paramilitary groups, and in particular, local communities who had for decades held very fragile relationships together during the worst periods of the violence. Within this ecosystem were subsystems where tensions were continually on the boil, requiring constant and careful management by political leaders who had already taken decisions to engage in the political process with all the attendant risks of it failing. Other pressures included political representatives of organisations previously engaged in violence but who now saw the need to move their strategy into the world of politics and ultimately compromise. These leaders had the task of managing the expectations of those within armed groups who had little regard and even less patience for the exigencies of politics or diplomacy. They also ran not just a political risk of being sidelined but an altogether more lethal risk that at any moment they could be dispensed with if the pace of politics proved too slow in delivering what might be termed key objectives by various paramilitary organisations on both sides.

Governments also had risks and calculations to make about the veracity of claims of commitments to peace in circumstances where such claims were regularly accompanied by acts of violence, as these organisations began to awaken to an old reality behind a new opportunity. The old reality was that this was a political problem of broken relationships and not a military or security problem. There was no military victory and no security response that was going to prove superior to a political settlement, no matter how long it took to achieve. Governments and officials had to constantly ask themselves in the years leading up to the agreement whether this was a real opportunity or whether people were being played and duped into believing that organisations wedded to violence for so long were now suddenly yet sincerely seeking a new direction. Thankfully, we had people and leaders who exercised wisdom and judgement and asked themselves at various points in the process what the wise thing to do next was; a theme shall return to later.

Throughout this period however, and regardless of whether people were central or peripheral to the process, the overall challenge was clear. This was how we achieved the age-old quest for accommodation with those on the island who differed in identity and perspective from the rest of us? Hundreds of years of history had clearly demonstrated that in a divided society or contested space like ours, violence from whatever source had only deepened the problem and made it more difficult to achieve the essential attitude of acceptance towards the other identity in pursuit of the elusive balance that an accommodation could deliver.

In our work in Glencree, much of it confidential during that period, as participants and practitioners we were engaged in an effort to find and encourage a balance of demands, concessions and achievements by all who participated in our Glencree dialogue process. We quickly learned that victories and defeats will not work in the contested space of Northern Ireland and that given the complicated and intertangled relationships between us on this island as well as with our near neighbour across the Irish Sea, we needed conversations that went to the very heart of who we were and how we saw ourselves across these two islands. I quickly learned and grew to understand that the idea of a pure and undiluted concept of Irish unity, or of an equally pure union between Northern Ireland and the UK, was in many respects a circular argument that allowed no room for departure from the respective orthodoxies of unionism or nationalism. Due to what history has handed us and where geography has placed us, and more importantly how the interplay of these two realities have shaped us, we are required to live to live with what I might call fuzzy edges at the extremity of our aspirations around "‘unity" or "union". What makes the acceptance of these mercurial edges of identity so difficult to achieve is the very basic human need to be accepted and validated in the identity we express ourselves to be. This was then, and remains today, an enormous challenge in how we discuss the future. In this contested space, every word is weighed and every phrase is loaded with meaning far beyond anything contained in the Oxford English dictionary. Through my engagement in Glencree, this understanding was of critical importance to many if not all who engaged with us between 1994 and 2007.

While some opponents of the agreement argue as to the effectiveness or otherwise of some of the component parts, including power-sharing and the pace of economic and social improvement for communities most impacted by the Troubles, nobody can deny that it has given us an entire new generation of people who live free from the threat and lived reality of violence. It has given us the peace and the space to look at each other, not with labels, but as communities and individuals emerging from a dark and traumatic period in our recent history. It has delivered policing reform, but as with any post-conflict society, this remains a challenging concept where the needs of society are constantly evolving against the backdrop of criminal gangs and other threats posed by international drug cartels, human trafficking, cybercrime and so forth.

There have been some notable achievements in North-South co-operation in areas such as healthcare, the all-island offering by Tourism Ireland to overseas visitors and the ongoing work of InterTradeIreland.

The agreement has not achieved a rapid and headlong march towards an historic reconciliation, but how could it, given the weight of history between these two islands, a weight primarily borne upon the shoulders of the two communities in Northern Ireland for the past 100 years? One community feels alienated from their neighbours and further estranged from those on the rest of the island who went a separate way after partition. The other community feels besieged and fearful about their future, never quite feeling that they had the support of their government in London, yet knowing that a significant number in the minority community with whom they shared villages and towns actively sought to alter irrevocably their place within the United Kingdom.

The community who are the British identity on the island of Ireland and who came and settled here 400 years ago brought many good things with them, for example, agricultural innovation, science, industrial development and architecture, as well as the displacement and detachment of those who dwelt there before. This is the fault line of Irish history, the echoes of which we hear to this day. Some 200 years afterwards, many from the Irish identity left the island, fleeing famine and hardship and seeking new lives on the neighbouring island as well as further afield. For centuries, we have continued to cohabit each other's spaces across these islands in ways no other communities do, thus creating the obvious question as to the obligations of our near neighbour in the process leading to the Good Friday Agreement. The weight of history is too great and the shoulders of these two communities are too narrow to bear it. It, therefore, required, and continues to require, that our neighbours come into concert with us in the co-equal sharing of this burden of British-Irish history as well as the collective quest for accommodation.

The agreement was an array of competing interests and challenges within and between communities. The participants in the talks ultimately took the vexed question of the future constitutional status of the island and struck a careful balance between union and unity, forcing all of us to accept an accommodation between the two strongly held perspectives. For republicans, the 1998 agreement was the culmination of an almost decade-long process of internal discussion around finding an alternative to violence. That alternative was the democratic persuasion of a majority that a new constitutional order would better serve the people of Northern Ireland and the island as a whole. For unionists, the principle of consent was both an assurance that no immediate changes would be made without the agreement of a majority in Northern Ireland, but it was also a challenge - if they want the union with the UK to continue into the longer term, they would have to persuade people from across society in Northern Ireland that the union was a more viable proposition than the alternative.

This is how the status of Northern Ireland was agreed to on Good Friday 1998 as distinct from how sovereignty was to be exercised over Northern Ireland, a point I shall return to in a moment. In essence, the status of Northern Ireland, whether within the UK or within a united Ireland, would be for the people of Northern Ireland to decide in referendums to be held across the island on the same day at some point in the future. Despite this agreed mechanism contained within the agreement and mandated by the people of the island as a whole on 22 May 1998, we still come back to the vexed question of the contested space and how we will share it in the future, not least in the context of our historical and geographical relationship with our nearest neighbour.

A question that may require some reflection is whether the journey to a new or agreed Ireland requires all concerned to pass through the junction of a reconciled Northern Ireland or whether that is a concept that people feel is dispensable on this journey. The agreement provides for the transfer of sovereignty between the jurisdictions in the event that the people of Northern Ireland, in conjunction with the people of the South, seek such a change. However, the agreement is quite prescriptive as to how the sovereign power must discharge its authority, having regard to the fact that there are two communities with competing sets of aspirations, ethos and identities, and is based upon the principle that both aspirations to unity and union are valid.

I wish to turn to the issue that has impacted the agreement and, more importantly, relationships more than any previous question since the signing of the agreement, namely, Brexit. The decision by the people of the UK to leave the EU was and remains a legitimate decision for them to take. Many historians will argue for decades to come as to how informed or otherwise the decision was, given all of the unforeseen consequences that have arisen since the process to leave the EU commenced in 2017. However, one thing is blatantly clear, and that is that the decision and the method of executing it have left chasms in the relationships between communities and governments far in excess of where they might have been if there had been no Brexit. In circumstances where we needed our neighbour to act in partnership with us in shouldering the weight of history, we have witnessed a reopening of the gulf between the two islands.

The 2016 referendum was completely legitimate as an offer and an action by the British people to leave the EU, but so, too, was the referendum of May 1998, which achieved the accommodation so desired by so many following 30 years of bloodshed. In effect, we have two referendums that are both valid yet appear to be in conflict with each other. Since the Good Friday Agreement strikes the fine balance between the aspirations for unity and union through a complex matrix of compromises, simple and unilateral solutions will not work unless we get the agreement of both sections of the community in Northern Ireland. While the Good Friday Agreement was not predicated upon Ireland and Britain being members of the EU, what has been revealed since 2016 is that the very fact of EU membership - not least the absence of physical barriers to the movement of goods or people across the island or between the islands - has been a major factor in sustaining the peace. The feeling among one section of the community that it has been removed from its shared and common identity with those who live south of the Border is a feeling shared by many unionists who feel that there are now physical arrangements making them separate from their fellow citizens on the neighbouring island of Britain. All of the balances struck in those days of Easter week 1998 are now profoundly disturbed and cannot simply be put back together in a series of political experiments or quick fixes that might work for a while before being revealed as inadequate in the context of the complexity of relationships within Northern Ireland and beyond. Expressions like strengthening the union in circumstances where there is no available option to balance this by way of equally strengthening the aspiration to unity is yet another example of how there has been an ongoing failure to appreciate the fundamental challenges set out in the February 1995 in the intergovernmental framework document. When they walked through the doors or rooms of Castle Buildings in 1998, the delegations did so with the following challenges to the forefront of their minds:

11. They [the two Governments] acknowledge that in Northern Ireland, unlike the situation which prevails elsewhere throughout both islands, there is a fundamental absence of consensus about constitutional issues. There are deep divisions between the members of the two main traditions living there over their respective senses of identity and allegiance, their views on the present status of Northern Ireland and their vision of future relationships in Ireland and between the two islands....

14. Both Governments accept that agreement on an overall settlement requires, inter alia, a balanced accommodation of the differing views of the two main traditions on the constitutional issues in relation to the special position of Northern Ireland.

The impact of language and statements over the past seven or so years has had the effect of conflating two concepts of sovereignty, first by Brexiteers and those who believed that leaving the EU was a matter of control and the need to take it back. Whatever control represented is still unclear and ill-defined. However, the conflation of UK sovereignty outside of the EU as distinct from how the UK exercises its sovereignty over Northern Ireland, which is prescribed in the agreement and is not the same as England, Scotland or Wales, leaves many asking what they think the UK signed 25 years ago and, in our case, why we amended our Constitution in return for an unbalanced constitutional accommodation.

I wish to address the issue of legacy and how it has been a casualty of the past seven years, where we have not seen a willingness by the British Government to meet its earlier commitments under the Stormont House Agreement. From our work, it is clear to us that, while the 2014 agreement did not get everybody's unequivocal support, it represents the last point of departure during which there was the largest degree of agreement among political parties and the two governments around commitments to victims and survivors and their families about how to address and acknowledge the harm they suffered during the years of violence. This is in stark contrast to the near total opposition by victims and others to the legacy legislation currently before the House of Lords in London. It is only right to say here today that the message we have heard from individuals, families and organised groups is that this legislation is a denial of their rights and interests, regardless of which community they come from.

It is often said by victims and their families about those who were lost in the Troubles that to be forgotten is to die twice over. Many see this legislation as the means to force society to forget and deny that there ever was a conflict, war, campaign or military operation and yet some 3,800 people lost their lives, with countless more dying as a result of trauma-related suicide in the years since the signing of the agreement.

Not unlike the character of Gloucester who stands over the body of the slain king in Shakespeare's King Lear, begging the widow, "Say that I slew them not", and the queen replies, "Then say they were not slain. But dead they are". Many victims and survivors who we have met believe that to pass this legislation would be tantamount to saying that there had been no conflict, there were none lost, and there are no crimes or questions to answer.

I thank the committee members for their time today. We welcome questions from them.