Brendan Ryan (Labour)

That brought about the major change in climate and in saying that I am not belittling the contributions of others. As a party colleague and a friend of Dick Spring, it would be remiss of me, however, not to say it.

I have always been in a peculiar position about the North in that I spoke sympathetically about Sinn Féin and its supporters when no one else did, at least publicly; I know of the private work done by many in this House, including Senator Mansergh. I talked about the need to draw people in, to get people out of a cul-de-sac, which I concede was of their own making, and now find myself quoting Dr. Ian Paisley about the need "to bite our lips" on some issues. Some of us who put our necks on the line politically to achieve that 15 or 20 years ago are entitled to say now that enough is enough. It is time to end the political dance into which we all have been hauled in recent years.

Many Senators find it extremely difficult to stomach the political opinions, leadership and role of the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party. Some people feel, however, that it is somehow less insensitive and less threatening to the peace process and everything we want to achieve to say something negative about him, than it is to say something about the leaders of a political and paramilitary movement that has deliberately killed hundreds of our fellow Irish people. How have we lost a sense of the difference between political disagreement and the fundamental moral gulf that separates us from a political organisation that engaged in a campaign of violence that did not have any moral or political basis?

The IRA is not the ANC or any of the liberation movements which I have supported throughout my political career. Its members were never in the situation in which Nelson Mandela found himself in South Africa and I am tired of the posturing of those who claim that they were. That type of nonsense was encountered again last week when the IRA said it will not do anything that would undermine the Agreement. Its representatives have said for the past two years that the IRA has done nothing to undermine the Agreement. They have pointed the finger at others over and over again.

I do not want to be unhelpful in this regard. People like me were willing to work, as a necessary part of being helpful, with people from Northern Ireland who had Sinn Féin and republican — with a small "r"— sympathies as part of an attempt to open doors. We should make clear to such people that they have alienated further many of those with whom they never had much sympathy. I refer to their scandalous political attacks on the Progressive Democrats, for example. I do not agree with the Progressive Democrats about much, or even anything.