Mr. Tim O'Connor:

I thank Ms Hanna. As is the case with Senator Currie, the nobility of Ms Hanna's family contributes to what she is doing so powerfully herself. I had the honour of working with her mother. I acknowledge that. We worked closely with all Ms Hanna's colleagues in the SDLP, including in the back room. People such as Mr. Mark Durkan, Mr. Sean Farren and Mr. Denis Haughey made contributions. I must mention the back room during those negotiations. Of course, Mr. Durkan subsequently became a front-room person, deputy First Minister and later an MP. At the time, he was in the back room. We were together in the engine room and he did a lot of valuable work around the drafting and the development of the concepts that eventually made it into the agreement. I thank Ms Hanna for her kind words about the civil servants. A range of us were involved and we all tried to bring our bit to the table.

I recognise the Durkanite influence in the reference Ms Hanna made to the agreement as a toolkit. She made an interesting point about the EU section of the Good Friday Agreement in strand two. To remind everybody, we included the following in the agreement:

The [North-South Ministerial] Council to consider the European Union dimension of relevant matters, including the implementation of EU policies, programmes and proposals under consideration in the EU framework. Arrangements to be made to ensure that the views of the Council are taken into account and represented appropriately at relevant EU meetings.

As that is included in the Good Friday Agreement, I understand why Ms Hanna mentioned it. That is not talked about very much. People might ask what happened to it. It was a classic example of creative drafting and trying to have something in the text which can be returned to and developed. People consented, as Ms Hanna said, to that. I am sure some people were not happy with it, some did not want it at all and others did want it. The North-South Ministerial Council met in approximately 2002 to try to put some flesh on the bones of what that might look like but, unfortunately, it never went anywhere because the Executive and Assembly were suspended in October 2002 and did not return until 2007. Ms Hanna referred to the beginnings of considerations to try to flesh out that paragraph. What would representation from the North-South Ministerial Council look like in the EU framework? I am giving personal recollections of the situation because nothing was actually formalised but we were starting to kick around ideas. For instance, a proposition from the North-South Ministerial Council could have been agreed by the two parties around the table, that is, the Northern Ireland Executive and the Irish Government, as a position which could have been taken away to Brussels through twin representations, with the British delegation and perhaps the EU advancing it through their channels and the Irish permanent representation also doing so. Perhaps the two representations together could have sought to advance something in a common way. That was the kind of thinking that was going on but as I say, it never went anywhere. I understand why Ms Hanna is pointing to that issue. It is a formal part of the agreement.

To return to Deputy Brendan Smith's point, we should remind ourselves that this was the will of the people. It is not only a piece of paper. Perhaps we could have spent more money on the document itself but we were being very cost conscious back in 1998. The agreement is the will of the people. It was approved in referendums both North and South. I hear people making comments that they never signed up to it and I am sorry but if they want the agreement changed, they have to go out and get agreement from the people in a new referendum to supplant it. Until that happens, the agreement is the sovereign will of the people of the island of Ireland. Ms Hanna is right that linking in with the EU is a part of the agreement and is available for exploration. It is true that we did not get very far with it but that was the kind of thinking we were doing.

The strand one discussions only took off very late in the negotiations, as the committee probably knows. Ms Hanna's colleagues were very heavily involved, along with the Ulster Unionist Party. There was a theology piece that we in the Irish Government delegation had to be careful about to ensure we were not interfering in the internal affairs of Northern Ireland. Part of the theology of negotiations, including back in the Brooke talks of the early 1990s and the Mayhew talks thereafter, was that the Irish Government could not formally be involved in strand one negotiations. That was a bit of theology that had to be observed. Much of the main negotiations on the detail of what emerged in strand one was done between the SDLP and the Ulster Unionist Party. The rest of us, including Sinn Féin, Alliance and the Irish Government, signed off on it. It was a matter of checks and balances. There is a lot of ingenuity in that regard within strand one. It is like anything else. To return to my human health analogy, things need refreshing. Things that might have made sense in 1998 do not necessarily hold up 25 years later, although some do. That is why we built into the structure, to return to the architectural analogy, the review clause in the agreement which states in the event that difficulties arise, operations can be reviewed with a view to resolving those issues. The review clause does allow for that within the terms of the agreement itself without breaching the agreement.