Mr. Trevor Lunn:

I thank the members for the questions. I thank Mr. Maskey for his compliments. He is quite right that I have been working with the families here for more than ten years now. To turn to what the politicians can do, the Seanad took a big step last night in terms of what they can do. They forced through the establishment of a citizens' assembly. Could I just point out that the British agreements that we have - the St. Andrews Agreement, the Good Friday Agreement, the New Decade, New Approach agreement and the Stormont House Agreement all reference the possible establishment of the sort of body we are talking about, in particular the Good Friday Agreement, which states that "a consultative Civic Forum will be established". It is not the only thing that has not been brought to pass arising from that agreement but it is there in black and white.

As to what the Irish Government can do to assist, I think the Irish Government would probably be more disposed to this move than perhaps the northern Government would be, but it has taken a good step last night. I tried to bring a motion before the House in Stormont to promote the idea of the establishment of a citizens' assembly, North and South. I have not made much headway with it yet because various parties are slightly resistant to the idea, but we will see where that goes. It is in its early stages.

Mr. Finucane mentioned protections for the unionist community and what would be built into whatever would come out of all this discussion.

There are three sections of unionists. There are the ones who vote for the Ulster Unionist Party and would be perfectly happy with the way they are. There are those who vote for the DUP who would never accept what we are talking about, but there is also probably 40% of the population who do not vote at the moment. We have joined the rest of the world in not being very good at voting and those are the ones we would need to convince. There are some Protestant unionists who will never accept this and it would not matter what came out of this discussion, but the question is how big a minority are they and to what extent should their views be taken into account. Obviously they must be taken into account, but how important are they in the overall scheme of things? That is probably all I would have to say about it. It is a work in progress.