Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

Over many years I have heard and participated in many debates and special statements on Northern Ireland in this House. I sincerely hope that this may be the last such occasion. It would signal that we had come to the end of a long and tortuous journey and would pay tribute to the contributions made by so many different people. I compliment the Minister of State, Deputy Martin Mansergh, who in his own short contribution, put on the record of the House a litany of names. This went only a small way to recognising the extraordinary number of talented Irish people, on both sides of this Border and across the water in our neighbouring island, who contributed to the construction of a pathway towards peace that ultimately became wide enough and enticing enough to allow even the most reluctant to participate and travel that journey.

I recall my mother, a mother of six, saying to me that any parent of a large family never goes fully to sleep until the last child is home safely. In that sense, Mother Ireland can now go safely to sleep in the sure knowledge that all the children, delinquent or otherwise, slow or quick learners, have finally found a way to live peacefully together. I endorse the claims and suggestions made by others concerning those remaining people who believe they have some kind of political mandate from history to use violence instead of persuasion, that they too would come home safely.

It is extraordinary to think of the young people of Northern Ireland who will go to the Westminster poll in May 2010 aged 18 years. They were 6 years of age when the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. If one thinks further back, their parents were probably only 6 years of age in 1974 when the Sunningdale Agreement was signed. As Seamus Mallon famously said, the Good Friday Agreement was Sunningdale for slow learners.

We have travelled a long way and should celebrate that. It is to be hoped there will be a normalisation of relations, not only on this island but between these islands. The institutions of the Good Friday Agreement must be worked vigorously, both on an east-west axis, between Dublin and London, and between Belfast and Dublin.

I acknowledge the presence here of both the Taoiseach, Deputy Brian Cowen, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Micheál Martin, and would like to put one suggestion for consideration to the Government. I would love to see some exploration of the possibility that a childhood in Northern Ireland could somehow be enhanced and repaired by developing a new kind of shared history for the people of these islands. This shared history should be taught in classrooms of both Glasgow Ranger and Glasgow Celtic supporters and in the classrooms of Belfast, Cork, Dublin, London, Bradford and even Warrington.

It should be a shared history of these islands and of the people who have populated them and of the migration that has taken place, North, South, east and west. It should be taught so that people's victories, trumpeted in the past years of violence, are no longer seen as somebody else's defeats. Rather, it should be shown that defeats and victories were the experience of all of the peoples of these two islands - economic defeats and migration defeats that forced people to leave the place in which they lived and grew up - so that we have a better understanding of our shared history. This is something that might be for a future generation to explore, because the wounds of the past 30-odd years of struggle will take at least a generation to heal. Learning about our shared history in an open and positive way, without bitterness, might help towards this.

I want to commend in particular the energy and attention both the Taoiseach and the Minister for Foreign Affairs have given to this project over a difficult period, at a time when they had a lot more to be doing. Their commitment to this project must be recognised.

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