Paul Bradford (Fine Gael)

We have to live with the consequences of how the people of Northern Ireland spoke. We talk about some parties winning the majority of the Unionist vote and other parties winning the majority of the Nationalist vote as if there was a substantial shift. If one looks at the total vote and the results in the constituencies, while there was a shift of seats, there was not a major shift in public opinion. There was perhaps one shift that has not been commented on and perhaps Senator Walsh, who spoke earlier about the dream of a united Ireland, should dwell on the fact that the total Unionist vote in the election, not including those who voted for the Alliance Party, seemed to grow substantially.

We debated informally over the past two years or three years how the population shift in Northern Ireland and the changed demographics would bring about an almost 50-50 political divide. The election result of a fortnight ago appeared to knock that argument on the head. I will not dwell on that because we should not try to solve problems by some sort of mathematical formula. In respect of the issue we are debating here and the broader issue of Northern Ireland, we must try to make progress in small steps.

The weapons issue remains firmly on the agenda. Weapons are part of the problem, but I am not sure how far we can go in trying to make them part of the solution. We will not arrive at a situation where every single weapon of destruction, be it an armalite, a bullet or a cartridge, will be collected. It simply does not work that way and it never has done so. If, in the Ireland of the early 1930s, when William T. Cosgrave was handing over power to his political opponents, he had demanded evidence to show there were no illegal weapons left, the handover would never have happened. If, in the Ireland of 1948, when John A. Costello was forming the first, broad-based, inter-party Government, he had demanded absolute assurances that every piece of weaponry formerly used by some components of the parties involved in that Government were fully decommissioned, we could not have proceeded.

There is only so far one can go in demanding that weapons are beyond use. It must be a strong political aspiration, but the issue is that if people have a willingness to go back to the type of armed politics they employed in the past, they can always purchase or obtain more weapons. While we seek reassurances and must insist that people who wish to practice politics disarm their armed wing, trying to obtain full proof of this disarmament is so difficult that if we put it at the very top of our political agenda we might find it impossible to progress that agenda. We must try to work with the political parties and particularly with those who previously did not show a commitment to politics to ensure that they are brought on and kept on side. We know from our history that politics works, just as we know that violence, division and sectarianism does not work. We must keep politics and its practice to the fore.