Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I know how personally committed Deputy Smith is to the peace process and its maintenance. We are still in a design phase in terms of what the commemorations will look like, although others are engaged in planning. Queen's University will hold a big event and an event also is planned in New York. We will obviously contribute and support those events. We will also host some of our own events. It is something on which we would like to get input from other political parties. If the Deputy has ideas and suggestions we will certainly try to take them on board.

Given my responsibilities, I am very conscious that the most important thing we could do to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement is to get devolved government up and running and functioning again, as well as the institutions which come from that in terms of the North-South Ministerial Council and so on. We have not had that for a year. We had some initial conversations on that yesterday.

This is not going to be easy but we have a responsibility, as co-guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement with the British Government, to try to get those structures up and running. Many of the commemorations would be somewhat hollow if people saw the progress so many people worked so hard to achieve over the past 20 years being undermined and reversed, and without the essential institutions, which are at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement, and the process of reconciliation, which ultimately needs to be the number one priority Northern Ireland.

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