Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I join with the Taoiseach and Deputy Kenny in congratulating the parties in the Northern Ireland Executive for having agreed yet another strategic step forward in arrangements for devolved government in Northern Ireland. I also want to extend my thanks and congratulations to the Taoiseach and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and their officials who on behalf of all of us here, have spent so much unexpected and prolonged time away from here in an effort to secure a successful outcome to the talks concluded by the parties.

Thanks are due, too, to all others who gave a hand in facilitating the agreement in Washington, London and Dublin. However, I want to reflect also on the number of times in which we in this House have made statements over the years on agreements usually ascribed as "final" that have been squeezed eventually from the Northern Ireland parties. How many times we have welcomed statements along the lines of the most recent: "This text is an affirmation in our shared belief in the importance of working together in a spirit of partnership to deliver success for the entire community." How many times these intended agreements, notwithstanding the encouragement and facilitation of Dublin, London and other capitals, have failed to eventually meet expectation or at least have ended up having such expectation deferred.

How many times is it realistic to foresee similar down-to-the-wire collapses of talks in Northern Ireland and the resumption of the always existing threat, the abolition of devolved government and the resumption of direct rule? I believe it is appropriate to do this now, in a week that saw a former colleague of mine, former Deputy Tomás MacGiolla, laid to rest and a still serving colleague, Mark Durkan, pass on the leadership of our sister party in Northern Ireland to his elected successor, Margaret Ritchie.

Tomás MacGiolla was a man of great principle and personal courage. He played a central role in weaning the republican movement away from its violent roots. If more people had listened to Tomás MacGiolla in the late 1960s, 30 years of violence and more than 3,000 deaths in Northern Ireland might have been averted. He was a genuine republican in the tradition of Wolfe Tone, an early advocate of the civil rights strategy in Northern Ireland and a fierce opponent of sectarianism. He was shocked and appalled by the campaigns of sectarian violence that blighted Northern Ireland for so long. Although he and I took different political paths in recent years, I have always retained an enormous respect for him, which I believe is shared by many on all sides of this House.

As regards my colleague, Mark Durkan's resignation, and the election of his successor, Margaret Ritchie, I want to put this on the record. The SDLP was born out of the civil rights movement in August 1970 and has, for four decades, been the voice of democratic nationalism in Northern Ireland. As a member of the Party of European Socialists and the Socialist International, it is a sister party of the Labour Party here and is solidly internationalist and socially democratic in outlook. Throughout the past 40 years the SDLP has never deviated from its core values. It has stood completely opposed to all violence, arguing that not only was this morally wrong, but politically bankrupt as well because violence always destroys that which it claims to defend. From its earliest days, as illustrated from as long ago as its 1972 policy document, Towards a New Ireland, the SDLP has argued for an agreement that addressed the three core sets of relationships: between Nationalists and Unionists in the North, between North and South and between Britain and Ireland. The Good Friday agreement was an agreement first designed and promoted by the SDLP, in Seamus Mallon's famous phrase as "Sunningdale for slow learners". I pay tribute to the designer of the Good Friday agreement, John Hume, his successor as party leader, Mark Durkan, and his successor in turn, Margaret Ritchie.

I join with the Taoiseach and Deputy Kenny in paying tribute to Mark Durkan. He was a key member of the SDLP team during the negotiations leading to the Good Friday agreement and he was, in many respects, its chief draftsman. In 2001, Mr. Durkan replaced Seamus Mallon as Deputy First Minister. He also succeeded John Hume as SDLP leader. He has represented the interests of nationalism, his party and his constituency with distinction since 2005. He has spoken strongly, including directly to my party, about justice issues, economic development, health care and children's rights. He has a well-established reputation as a leading advocate on international development and he will continue to speak vehemently at Westminster about these issues.

Throughout the worst and most disastrous weeks, months and years in Northern Ireland, the SDLP has always adhered to its conviction, namely, that argument works better than violence. I am hopeful as regards the latest agreement, the Hillsborough agreement. However, in my parliamentary lifetime I can recollect similar statements welcoming breakthroughs in talks and fresh agreements coming from, for example, the Downing Street Declaration, the Good Friday Agreement, the St. Andrews Agreement and now the Hillsborough agreement. Recently, we saw a quotation from the Guardian newspaper greeting yet another previous breakthrough in Anglo-Irish talks. The Guardian opined: "The impossible has happened and the Irish controversy...is, to all intents and purposes, settled. It is a splendid achievement ... Let us thank Heaven that that chapter of our history is closed and that a new one opens today." The problem is that quote from the Guardian, republished in the history pages of the Irish Times, came from its editorial opinion on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, published almost 90 years ago in 1921. For almost 90 years since then, politicians North and South, east and west, have been doing mostly not enough, but sporadically their best to achieve progress.

Tremendous damage has been done in the interim by people with irredentist views who put politics above any value they place on human life, and who have destroyed human life on an industrial scale in the interests of what they regarded as political progress. Meanwhile, politicians have attempted agreements, most recently with the political representatives of those most responsible for the most devastation. Each successive experience of devolved government in Northern Ireland has had to be re-rescued, by talks led by the two Governments. Let us all hope that the latest agreement now arrived at will work.

This latest agreement moves things on, but politics has also moved on in Northern Ireland. At the time of the Good Friday Agreement, it was hoped that the centre would strengthen and that in a climate of peace, moderate politics would thrive. Instead, the political initiative and support moved to those with a harder line. Now Sinn Féin and the DUP are the dominant parties, not the SDLP and the Ulster Unionist Party, the parties which led the making of the Good Friday Agreement. Power is shared between two parties which have yet to convince that they believe in the concept of sharing power on a daily basis in an atmosphere of trust and with a hope to building a shared future.

While I welcome the agreement about modalities for the appointment of a justice Minister in Northern Ireland to administer policing, I am concerned at the manner in which the process for selecting the party to hold that office has been altered. Under the d'Hondt system used to allocate every other Minister, the SDLP would be next in line for the post. That process is being ignored on this occasion and it is believed the Alliance Party will be lined up to get the position. I would welcome David Forde's appointment to the post. The Alliance Party is a thoroughly decent political movement that has preached partnership and power-sharing throughout its existence. It is deeply committed to creating the shared future between all the people in Northern Ireland that so many of us recognise as a requirement. However, the over-riding of the SDLP's right to achieve this political outcome does public trust in the political system no good whatsoever and it adds to the perception that this deal has been made at the insistence of the DUP and Sinn Féin.

I fully understand the need to accommodate all shades of political opinion and cross-community representation in post-conflict societies. However, as Mark Durkan stated 18 months ago, we must begin to think about removing some of the ugly architecture around the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive. This may not yet be the time but moving towards voluntary coalitions rather than the mandatory system that exists at present must be a long-term aim of all parties on this island. In reality, all parties in Northern Ireland are living in a context of voluntary coalition, even if the concept is anathema to some of them, but power-sharing is still a fragile concept.

If last week's agreement shows that more work can and will be done by the two major parties involved, then it will have been a good day's or 10 days' work. Voters on both parts of this island shared an important part of a journey when they voted overwhelmingly to support the Good Friday Agreement. Their votes were the strongest mandate for a new departure in Irish politics, North and South of the Border.

To appreciate how far we have come, we should take stock of what we have left behind. More than 3,500 deaths on this island, over 30 years, were directly linked to the sectarian conflict in the North. Approximately 100 people a year on this small island were murdered every year since 1969, simply because of who they were, where they came from, who they voted for or the church they prayed in. For every murder victim, there was an ever-increasing circle of the injured, bereaved and frightened.

Some politicians calcified the bitterness, handing it on to their successors. Communities were brutally segregated. The politics of the latest atrocity overshadowed the wider tragedy. The national question dominated Irish life for decades when we could have been questioning what kind of social and economic future we wanted for ourselves and our children. However, that is the past and we need to be ambitious for the future. We need to be ambitious for peace. We need to be ambitious for a peace that is not simply the absence of aggression, a peace that is not simply a new rewriting of a complicated deal about power-sharing. We also need to be ambitious for a peace that results from willing and easy sharing of space, a peace between people at ease with each other and working to assist each other.

The sad fact is that while all this drama about devolved government and its arrangements is played out, the scourge of sectarianism remains and infects the lives of many people in Northern Ireland on a daily basis. Although the latest and long-awaited high-level engagement and resolution between political leaders is always welcome, the fact remains that society in Northern Ireland is now more sustained in its divisions, such as those associated with where people live, socialise and send their children to school, than it was three decades ago. We have witnessed the increasing danger referred to by both the Taoiseach and Deputy Kenny, that is, the re-emergence of extremist violence. I send the best wishes of the Labour Party to Constable Peadar Heffron on his recovery from the appalling injuries he has suffered. The saddest fact of all is that, although Sinn Féin and the DUP can agree about policing and justice, the "Shared Future" agenda for improving community relations on a daily basis, and for improving the lived experience of their own constituents, is still the last agenda item they can agree upon.

The agreement just made provides for the devolution of policing and justice. This is, by any standards, great progress. We must now look increasingly to the future and the kind of society that we should build North and South, a society based on fairness and tolerance and rooted in democracy.

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