Maurice Hayes (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Brian Lenihan, to the House and I thank the Minister, Deputy Dermot Ahern, for his clear, helpful and constructive statement. It was also a privilege to listen to the perceptive and thoughtful analysis of Senator Mansergh, who contributed so much in a previous incarnation to these activities.

The important part of the statement is that the Governments are sticking together. Progress has been made over the years when the Governments have worked in double harness and it is important to maintain that approach. It is also important that the Government maintains its lines of communication and continues to have access to and be accessible to all parties while maintaining their trust. If that means acting as an honest broker, so be it.

No one in the North has clean hands, no one has a monopoly of virtue. There have been remarkable acts of courage on all sides and there has been fallibility on all sides. We should not demonise or canonise anyone. We should look forward without recrimination from where we are now.

It is, however, a pity that we did not go the full mile over the last few weeks. The IRA statement was a great advance on anything that had come before. Mr. Adams's serial expansions of it were extremely helpful and would nearly have satisfied me. What was lacking then and what is available this week is a single sentence from the IRA saying his statement represented what it had to say. It is a pity that was not available last week.

It is a pity that the Unionist leadership, Mr. Trimble in particular, could not have been more graceful in accepting the extent of the advance the republican movement has made. We have now come to the stage, five years after the Good Friday Agreement, where the chips are down. The other parties to the Agreement implicitly believed they were doing a deal with the republican movement and were not particularly interested in the theological differences between one part of it and another. The people who voted for it voted for peace on that basis. It is now time for the republican movement as a whole to commit itself to the democratic process. That means not having a body outside that process that is not amenable or accountable to the ballot box. The important thing is not that one abjures interfering in the democratic process but that one does not retain the power or potential to do so in the future. Finality is required.