Maurice Hayes (Independent)

I welcome the Minister to the House. I am grateful to Fianna Fáil for tabling this motion at such an appropriate time. I am also grateful to my colleagues for the courtesy of allowing me to speak on it.

It is time, as previous speakers said, for paying tributes and to thank the people who stuck with this process over the years and who have carried off an intermediate triumph at least. I congratulate the Minister on the work he has been doing, which seems to have been rather crowned by the atmosphere that was prevailing, as far as we were told, at the meeting in Farmleigh today. There is also the enormous work done by the Taoiseach and Tony Blair over the past ten years. Both of them have a monument to their efforts. These are the people who breasted the tape. I think of this as a relay race. We should also consider those people who carried the baton at different times and in different ways. Included among those is our distinguished colleague, Senator Mansergh, whose contribution at crucial times was incomparable. Last night, the Minister and I were engaged in an event in Derry which honoured John Hume. It is right that his name should be also written into the record.

Like Senator Brian Hayes, I regard this as a triumph for democracy. It is a triumph for politics. Great credit should be paid to those people who persuaded those who were committed by history and ideology to the resolution of problems by the gun that they would make more progress by embracing normal politics. That has been a great advance. I do not see the arrangements in Northern Ireland now as some strange marriage of extremists. It is a question of people having moved into the middle ground, although they shoved out some other people who were already on that middle ground. We are in the middle ground of politics.

We should never forget the victims over the years, those who have suffered and those who died on all sides and their families. While we have to find some means to help those people to deal with their memories and hurt, I hope that people can begin to look forward rather than back. I hope we do not have to keep picking at sores and opening them up all the time. There comes a time to draw a line and lines should be drawn. That is not to say that we do not have to find some sophisticated and proper means of helping people to deal with their problems. If we keep exhuming the dead week after week it will simply produce more travail.

The parties in Northern Ireland have formed a Government. We should not expect them, nor should they expect, to perform miracles in a short time. All governments, even the most experienced, make mistakes. The longer they are in power, the bigger the mistakes they make. That is not a reference to any Administration in this jurisdiction or any other one of which the Minister is aware.