Seanad debates

Wednesday, 22 October 2003

I fully agree with what Senator Brian Hayes said and that we all must temper our language on Northern Ireland. I agree with one thing SDLP leader Mark Durkan said last night, that one of the problems was that there were only two parties to the agreement and as no one else was there they could not verify precisely what was agreed. We have two conflicting versions of what was agreed and that is part of the risk of only having two bodies involved. It was a decision taken by the two Governments to facilitate negotiations between two parties but one of the problems is that nobody was there to verify what was agreed. One of the fantastic roles of the SDLP for the last 20 to 30 years has been that of bridge-builder and if other parties had been present in these negotiations there would have been considerably less room for confusion. There is a lesson to be learned from that about how to handle this in future. I do not wish to say anything beyond that because we could jeopardise what we hope will be considerable progress.

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