Ms Liz O'Donnell:

The letter was kind of a last-minute thing. I think David Trimble was panicking and his colleagues in the Ulster Unionist Party were talking of walking out, so he needed a last-minute confidence-building measure on the decommissioning issue; understandably so because it was not tied down and was vague and ambiguous. It was a commitment to decommission but it was not tied down timewise. As there was no time limit on it, he was being asked to make a leap of faith that the bona fides of the armed groups were genuine, that the IRA arsenal in particular definitely would be dealt with and that the commitment was not just a long promise. The Prime Minister therefore stepped in at the last moment with the letter. It was not part of the agreement - it was a side letter - but David Trimble needed that confidence before he signed up, bearing in mind that people in the unionist camp were walking out.

We need to remember how much pressure the Ulster Unionist Party was under at that time. Its was alone. There was a sort of consensus between the SDLP, the Irish Government and Sinn Féin. We knew where we were going. We knew the outline, the framework, of a possible settlement. There was trust between us and we had the support of the Oireachtas. We were in a very strong position. David Trimble was on his own and was being attacked from the outside. The fact that that huge cohort of unionist opinion was not even in the talks made his position even more precarious and so it proved to be. Over every election subsequently, the Ulster Unionist Party went down to one MP from nine. David Trimble needed a lot of support and we gave it to him. Both Governments gave him a lot of support by recognising his difficulty. It is similar with the DUP now. There were no DUP members in the talks, so it took them quite a while to come to the St. Andrews Agreement when they entered the process and agreed to devolution and to taking power with Martin McGuinness at the time. We overcame a great many difficulties at that time. It is hard to think we cannot overcome the difficulties we face now with the DUP but their members do need sufficient support and confidence-building from the two Governments to encourage them in respect of the protocol to take the leap of faith David Trimble took.

Unfortunately, the protocol has become tied up with the issue of an allegiance. It has become an allegiance-based argument, rather than an argument about practical implementation of the protocol. The perception among the DUP and the wider unionist community is that in some way, the protocol is interfering with their sovereignty as part of the UK. It is not and that is what the work has to be. The courts have ruled that the protocol is not interfering with their sovereignty and their guaranteed position in the UK. I feel it is just a matter of whether we can regain and recapture the sense of collective responsibility to make things work. That is just what we have to do. It was not easy for Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness to do what they did back then, to make the leap and to say this was as good as they were going to get, that this was an agreement and that there was parity of gain and parity of pain. Getting back to that collective feeling of purposeful work is what is needed in the present impasse but I know work is going on behind the scenes to try to do that and to build up trust.

If I have one regret, it is that I think we could have done with an implementation clause, which may have helped us. We did not have that in the agreement. Then there are some of the things we thought would be useful to help minority parties, that is, the capacity of a big party to block things. That has proved to be disastrous because it leads to ransom politics and people saying that if they do not get their way, they will block it. Some of those things have turned out to be not what we had in mind.

As for the North-South bodies, the present situation is of huge regret to me. It is a matter of working north-south and the peoples of the island working together. As the great John Hume used to say, it is the division of the people, not of the territory, that is causing the problem. If only we could just learn to work together. In that context, I welcome the shared island initiative the Taoiseach has proposed. It does not get enough airplay here but I have looked at what it is and it is a fantastic opportunity to do those things we intended the North-South bodies to do all those years ago. It is a matter of co-operating for our mutual benefit in areas such as health, climate change, biodiversity, the canals and all the things on which we can work happily together without neuralgic fears of political unity. It is the advocacy for political unity that is frightening the horses. We should work in the way the Taoiseach has suggested on the shared island initiative, which is a heavily funded initiative and which is really good. It is supporting cross-Border research, education, healthcare, biodiversity and agriculture. That is what we had imagined the North-South Ministerial Council could oversee. Because the institutions in the North have not been sitting sufficiently, the North-South dimension has not worked either. I think it would be of great regret to Seamus Mallon and John Hume in particular that the institutions in the North are not sitting effectively. Their greatest wish, far more than political unity or changes to Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution, and far more important to them, was that the people of Northern Ireland and the Republic would work together on shared initiatives and that that would ease the tensions and build confidence between the two communities. The great promise of the Good Friday Agreement has not been achieved because reconciliation has not been achieved, because people have not been working together and because the institutions are not sitting now and have been sitting only fitfully for a couple of years over the 25 years. It means that people are not meeting, getting to know one another and losing the hesitancy between them as human beings. I really hope that the institutions get up and running. Short of that, the shared island initiative is fantastic and should be welcomed by all the community in Northern Ireland. It is very well funded, with €1 billion up to 2030. What is not to like about that, about the communities working together on shared initiatives of mutual benefit, funded by the Irish Government?