Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister to the House. I also welcome this Bill. In some ways it is reasonably remarkable that a Bill of this type has being brought forward in the current political circumstances. Despite all the difficulties it is a source of satisfaction that the North-South implementation bodies continue to operate, albeit on a care and maintenance basis. That is not entirely satisfactory in that it limits new initiatives. The most obvious one being the case of Waterways Ireland undertaking any serious work on the restoration of the Ulster Canal.

There was great fear of institutionalised North-South co-operation right up to the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement but, apart from the question of ministerial attendance in the North, that has been the least of the problems since the signing of the Agreement. Despite the interdependence of the institutions there is general consent on all sides for the implementation bodies to continue their work. Obviously, a stop-start situation would be totally unsatisfactory and it would be very difficult to get people to work for them on that basis. Given the work they are doing and perhaps the more valuable work they could do in the future, it is important to get the Good Friday Agreement working again. I am glad to say that both Governments are committed to doing that. I accept there is a slight question mark over one of those Governments today given that voting is taking place but the opposition in Britain is also committed to the Good Friday Agreement.

The Minister did not make it clear in introducing the Bill whether there was any particular circumstance or specific concern that prompted the swift passage of this legislation or whether a flaw in legislation was identified. Under the precautionary principle, once a flaw has been identified it must be corrected as quickly as possible.

I do not share the concern of Senator McHugh about the so-called rushing through of this legislation. This Bill deals with one specific technical point. It is not complex legislation being rammed through in a couple of hours. It is not comparable to that type of situation. It is correct that State property should not be alienated except where the State consciously and specifically decides it should do so.

In the wider context of the stability of and the prospects for restoring the Agreement, I would like to make two brief points. I hope that when people analyse the results in Northern Ireland, whatever they may be, in the next few days and when people moan and perhaps wring their hands about polarisation, etc., we should be absolutely clear that one of the main contributory causes is the first past the post system. Bipolarity is built into that system, which The Economist last week described as brutal. There is no doubt about it. John Hume has argued this for a long time. That voting system is totally unsuited to a divided community in Northern Ireland. Whatever the outcome of the prospects of, say, the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP, it is highly unlikely that either party will fall below, or even necessarily anywhere near, 10% of the vote. However, the effects of the first past the post system may be to leave such parties with little or no representation at Westminster.

I have spoken about this to the Secretary of State, Paul Murphy, in the context of the British-Irish Interparliamentary Body and I would like to think the British would do something about this system. It almost totally discourages cross-community voting which one would have thought one would wish to encourage in Northern Ireland on the basis that people would not harm their own community by expressing a lower preference on the other side. I have no illusions that this will happen because the interests of the two big parties in Britain is a bipolarity that squeezes all middle parties. People should not blame the Agreement, the Governments, various parties or the leaderships concerned, rather it is the system that contributes to the polarisation in Westminster elections.

In the context of the stability of the Agreement, restoring it and so on, I wish some of our commentators would be a little more careful sometimes in the way they use language. I noticed yesterday in the context of coverage of those unhappy events in Cork where a couple was kidnapped, one of the people taken in for questioning was described as a "die hard republican". Without prejudice to the question of whether the person was involved and whatever about the word "die hard", I do not recognise that there was any republicanism involved in that type of kidnapping which was done presumably for money-raising purposes. It was suggested that the individual concerned had been expelled from a main paramilitary organisation a number of years ago. There were no principles of republicanism involved. It would be hard to believe that anyone involved in such actions had any understanding or conception of the needs of republicanism. I will finish on that point. I support the Bill.