Mr. Tim O'Connor:

It is hugely important. Historically, we had been apart until around the 1970s. In the early 1970s there was still a view from London that Northern Ireland was none of the business of Dublin but by 1972, that began to change. A Green Paper had been produced by Downing Street that talked for the first time about the Irish dimension. That was the beginning of more joined-up thinking and of accepting that there was a role for Dublin in some form in Northern Ireland.

Deputy Brendan Smith and Senator Blaney raised the points of the personal relationships at political level. They are so fundamental. They do not ultimately resolve the substance, but they give it the best possible chance. I say this because the politicians will know that they are now talking straight. They will no longer be thinking, “What are they saying?”. This is because the relationship of trust has been built. In order for trust to be built, people have to find ways to come together. I am a great believer in the power of institutions to enable people to come together. It is quite difficult for people who have been historically conflicted to just say that they will pick up the phone, because they will not do so.

If an institution is created which has the checks and balances and can allow you to be comfortable, and you have to participate in that institution, that is what enables the relationships to build. That is why - back to architecture - the institutions which have enabled enemies to come together have been an important part of it that would not be available if it was ad hocwhere picking up the phone to each other is not going to happen. That is why I say I saw it myself with my own eyes. What did the North-South Ministerial Council look like between 1999 and 2002? There were 65 meetings. What did it look like when unionists and Sinn Féin Ministers were coming together on the Northern side, which was often the case, of a table and the then Fianna Fáil Minister or a Progressive Democrats, PD, Minister on the Southern side? I was an official watching this. The answer is it looked very good, because, going back to what David Trimble said, we got the architecture right.

I myself had a principle in Armagh with my team. There were approximately 30 of us and I said to them that our job every week from Monday to Friday was to manage complexity. There was a key principle that we operated, metaphorically, up on the wall, which is the principle of no surprises, that we would say what we would do, we would do what we said we would do and then we would tell people we did what we said we would do. That was a really important way in which we prepared all the meetings and that then enabled relationships to develop because people gradually began to feel confidence that when they were around this table and in this space there would not be surprises. For example, flags was a very difficult issue for ministerial meetings. A North-South Ministerial Council meeting would take place in a hotel somewhere in Dublin, around the country, in Fermanagh or wherever, and the thing was if a unionist Minister was photographed under a tricolour: it was bang, got you. In making the preparations, I remember going to a hotel and talking to the manager beforehand about the meeting come up and saying that it was very sensitive. I told him we had got to be careful that there are no flags. He said not to worry as they did not even have a flagpole. The committee will see what I mean about no surprises because if that happened - I know I am laughing here - if that photograph happened with politicians around, I would be in trouble and I would not have a meeting.

The names of places is another example. How were we to call a meeting taking place in Derry - Londonderry? There were all these kinds of sensitivities. That is why I refer to the institutions. That has been the European experience as well. The institutions have created the framework and spaces with which people have to come together. Then once they are together, things will happen.