Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I express the Government's appreciation of the support expressed by some Members of the House today for the Stormont House Agreement and the Government's role in negotiating it. The Stormont House Agreement was a necessity. The months before the political talks began were characterised by political deadlock and a public increasingly disheartened by the inability of the political system to deliver reconciliation and economic renewal for Northern Ireland. The talks embody the collective desire at Stormont and Westminster and in Leinster House to show that politics can deliver by addressing a range of contentious issues, including how best to deal with the legacy of the past and charting a way forward that will deliver for all the people of Northern Ireland. The Stormont House Agreement has created the conditions necessary to allow a fresh start in 2015 and beyond. It is the potential for a new beginning which Northern Ireland's leaders need to embrace fully.

I will address some of the points raised by previous speakers, in particular, about the outstanding commitments of previous agreements. As the Minister, Deputy Charles Flanagan, has underlined, the Government remains strongly committed to ensuring outstanding commitments are fulfilled. It must be repeated that, notwithstanding that commitment, the agenda for the most recent talks was essentially focused on outstanding commitments arising from the Good Friday and St. Andrew's Agreements, the foundational agreements of the peace process. To be clear, the Irish Government was not a party to the negotiations which dealt specifically with budgets and financial reform. That must be understood for the historical record of the House and the purposes of clarity in reply to some of the points raised by Members opposite.

While the case of the late Pat Finucane did not come within the scope of the Stormont House Agreement, the position of the Irish Government on this important point has not changed.

A commitment to having a public inquiry on the murder of Pat Finucane, as provided for in the Weston Park agreement of 2001, should be honoured and we continue to raise the case with the British Government. We were very conscious of the needs of the victims and survivors in the South, including the families of the victims of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings and others. The new independent commission on information retrieval will operate North and South. When appropriate, we will, in a timely fashion, legislate for it.

In terms of what was explicitly on the agenda, the Government's mandate going into the talks was to facilitate agreement between parties who held very different and differing views and this meant making a realistic assessment of what was possible within a very tight timeframe and locking down the best possible outcomes. We achieved this. The president of Sinn Féin, one of the parties opposite, has signed up to it, despite some of the attempts to revise his party's position on the talks. Having signed up to it, we stand over it.

It is a matter of regret that the Executive parties and the British Government were unable to agree on the inclusion of the Irish language Act in the Stormont House Agreement. Nevertheless, we succeeded in ensuring the agreement contained an important and formal recognition by both Governments of the need for respect for and recognition of the Irish language in Northern Ireland. The Government will continue to advocate for the enactment of an Irish language Act and to encourage the Northern Ireland parties which support an Act to continue to build the necessary enabling consensus among their Executive colleagues. One of the parties opposite, Sinn Féin, is part of the Executive. I beg the Leas-Cheann Comhairle's indulgence because there are some important points that must be addressed, if I may.

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