Lord Empey:

I am very happy to be a member of the committee under the chairmanship of the Senator. Before the Good Friday Agreement was signed, a draft came out the previous weekend. It was the first time that Senator Mitchell had put something on paper and sent it round to us. Part of that included proposals for North-South bodies, which were always in the mix. There is no issue with that. A series of areas were listed, some of which my colleagues felt were too wide and too many, but that was not the key issue for me. The issue for me was the proposal was that those bodies would have executive powers over their specific areas of responsibility over the island as a whole and, therefore, would not be, as is currently the position, responsible to the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Dáil. It struck me that this meant that when you allocated those particular subject matters, whatever they happened to be, and put them together be they four, five or six, what you had in essence was an all-island government. That was contrary to what we had been negotiating with regard to the constitutional issues. It was one of those areas where, coming as it did at a very late stage, it shocked a number of us. When we saw that paper, it was obvious to me that we were never going to agree to that. We did not have any internal arguments about it because everybody was on the same page. It was obvious to us that we were not going to be able to do it and did not want to do it. We did not have issues in principle with North and South working together but we did have issues about handing over executive powers from the Oireachtas and the Northern Ireland Assembly to a third party, in terms of a North-South body, whereby that body could exercise executive authority throughout the island when the Assembly and the Houses of the Oireachtas could not. That in essence was the problem.