Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for that warm welcome.  Incidentally, and to put the record straight, I'm also the vice chairman of the Irish-American Parliamentary group.  So, it's not all one-sided.  But you may or may not recognize by my accent that I'm neither English nor Irish – I'm a Welshman, although you could also probably recognize by my name that I have Irish ancestry.  There are not many Murphys in Wales indigenously and about 160 years ago like many Irish-American families my people came from Ireland to escape the poverty but instead of coming to America they went across the other side of the Irish Sea.  It's interesting because this week is, of course, St. Patrick's week.  We don't have a St. Patrick's Day any more – it's become St. Patrick's week.  St. Patrick, of course, as you know, was a Welshman and he was a Welshman who went across the Irish Sea to convert the Irish to Christianity and stayed there, of course, and became an adopted Irishman. 

It's interesting that during the St. Patrick's week all Irish leaders including the Prime Minister, the Taoiseach of Ireland, myself as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, all the leaders of the political parties in Northern Ireland flee the Island of Violence and they all come to Washington.  It's a funny old business but it's actually very useful because you get the opportunity to see people you don't get a chance to so you travel 3,000 miles to meet people who will love you,who loved me when I went to the reception last week.  Why do they come here?  For the weather obviously but as well as that they come because the United States has played a very important role over the last number of years in helping bring about peace in Northern Ireland.  Both administrations – the administration of President Clinton and President Bush – both of them and indeed congressmen and senators from both houses on the hill have been very committed and dedicated to the business of making peace in Northern Ireland.  They've done it through a variety of reasons, all of them good, partly of course because 40 million of your countrymen and women claim Irish heritage of one sort or another which is a lot of people and there is indeed a very strong commitment among Irish-Americans particularly those who take an interest in politics in trying to bring about peace in Northern Ireland.

But it's also symptomatic of the tremendous relationship between our two countries, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.  And now we try to help the world t become a better and more peaceful place.  Obviously, we've seen in the last week or so the poignant tragedies in Spain and when we look at global internationals terrorism there are enormous challenges ahead of us.  But nevertheless working together as countries which value peace and democracy and want to outdraw terrorism in all its forms so it was then that the United States played its role in trying to finish terrorism on the Island of Ireland.  It was George Mitchell who chaired the talks alongside myself and others.  George was the main chairman and he played an enormously important role in bringing people together.  I would like to remember at the time of the signing of the Good Friday ________ the actual day itself, Good Friday 1998, the President in a different time zone, of course, phoned all the parties leaders in Northern Ireland encouraging them to make the deal.  And, so we owe a great deal to the United States, to selected politicians and its people for the work that they and you have done towards bringing about peace.  Because as you know, for thirty to forty years that very small part of the world one -- one-half million people – that's all it is – living in a very small geographical area, half the size of Wales, experienced untold misery and mayhem over three decades.  All sorts of reasons led to it.  I needn't go into those today except that they were real and troubled reasons but it meant that at the end of the day there was a conflict in Northern Ireland which meant that 3,500 people perished in those three decades, nearly all of them on Irish soil.  In addition to that, of course, there were outrages in Britain as well but mainly in Northern Ireland itself.  And if you think about the population of 1-1/2 million people and 3,500 people in thirty years dying because of it – and that's not counting by the way the hundreds of thousands of people who didn't die but were injured in some form or another either psychologically or physically -- and you would translate that figure to the population of Greater Los Angeles of 10 million people and you're talking about over 30,000 people dying here in this city and county – that's an astonishing figure. 

When I first went to Northern Ireland _____ Deputy there wasn't a family I talked to who wasn't affected by the troubles in Northern Ireland.  Employment was tragically low, people wouldn't invest there but worst of all it was a dangerous and unstable place in which to live.  People were divided in a calamitous way for the success and prosperity and stability and peace in that part of the world.  So, it was a huge difficulty, which we faced as both the British and Irish governments.  The conservative government and John Majors particularly it started the process of the talks.  We then won the election in 1997 and continued them.  In those talks all the political parties and the Irish and the British governments were in a room just like this and in other rooms like it trying to ensure that we produced an agreement which would mean that we would put an end to those terrible years of misery.  And in the end we did it on Good Friday in 1998.  A very emotional day.  I was there.  Everybody was in tears as you can imagine because we had, we thought, cracked the terrible problem of terrorism and instability – instability in Northern Ireland.  The agreement was voted upon by people north and south overwhelmingly.  Ninety-odd percent of people living in the Republic voted for it, over 70 percent in Northern Ireland voted for it and we believe by the polls that the majority of those Protestants and Catholics voted yes for that agreement.  It was a very difficult one.  It wasn't just about setting up assemblies and governments.  It was about dealing with the police, dealing with the press and the human rights and equality, Irish language and most controversial of all it actually let out of prison hundreds and hundreds of people, both Protestant and Catholic, who had committed the most outrageous crimes against their own people – that's as they would have seen it and in order to further their own cause.  That was the most difficult of all the recommendations in the proposals in the agreement with the approval of the people, but we did it in order to bring peace to Northern Ireland and to deal with what is termed by the academics "conflict resolution." 

And, indeed, we have seen as a consequence quite a remarkable change in Northern Ireland.  After a lot of bickering and squabbling and arguing and all the rest of it, we did eventually set up an assembly.  That assembly was a law-making body and embedded into the rules of that assembly was that neither one side or the other would have an automatic majority or indeed vote with each other.  That had been the problem of the years before and so in this uniquely in the whole world the assembly could only operate and indeed the government which came from the assembly all ten ministers dealing with all sorts of things from education to health and so on they could only operate if they agreed with each other – not on everything but on key issues.  There has to be agreement.  In other words, you could not have a parliament or a government unless both sides agreed to work it.  There were other arrangements too.  Special arrangements between the north and the south of Ireland, a human rights commission was set up, an equality commission, a review of the criminal justice system.  Chris Patten came in and made a report on the police which has been changed dramatically in Northern Ireland.  All those things were there as a consequence of the Good Friday Agreement and for a number of years it went along reasonably well.

In October 2002 the assembly was suspended by my predecessor, John Reid..  The reason was that the confidence and trust had broken down between the Unionist on the one hand and the Republicans on the other. The result was that the assembly lay suspended and still is suspended despite the fact that we've had an election last November.  And the problem that lay at the heart of it there two things: nationalists were suspicious that the Unionist wouldn't share power with them – they didn't want to share power with Catholics as you would say.  And as well as that there was the continuing existence of paramilitary activity. The cease fires hadn't broken down on the Republican side; there were no ____________________________________________________ but they were being done by dissent Republicans and neither _____ were people being shocked in the way they were before but nevertheless the activity of a paramilitary nature was still carried on and indeed it is still carried on.  The government  ______________ defining what that was – targeting people who they might shoot, surveillance, ______ weapons and most obviously and visibly of all of these things the so-called punishment beatings which still occur in Northern Ireland. These are shootings and beatings by paramilitary groups of individuals mainly within their own communities by shooting them in the knee or the ankle or sometime in both of them, or in the thigh, sometimes beating them almost to a pulp and they have increased in the last number of weeks and months to such an extent that I was talking with a surgeon the other day from Belfast who told me that every day now, every night, from both sides Loyalists and Republicans, people are coming in being beaten up or shot by paramilitaries.  Some of those paramilitaries used to belong to what was regarded as political terrorist organizations and now engaged in criminality – things like smuggling and protection rackets and so on.  So that side, we thought in 1998, wouldn't go away straight away because it was 30 to 40 years of difficulty but would fade away much more quickly than they have and the continued existence of that has meant that the political parties will have to work together in order to bring the assembly and the executive on to a working fashion have failed to agree or have confidence in each other to such an extent that three or four weeks ago when we were reviewing the institution a paramilitary incident took place in Belfast which the IRA did and it torpedoed the talks that I was chairing and they virtually came to a standstill.  Happily, coming to the United States just meant that we had a bit of a breather and we've been able to talk to each other and when next week we go back to Northern Ireland the two prime ministers, Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair, myself and the Irish Foreign Minister will meet with all the parties to see whether we can look at this issue again and put things together.  We have set up an independent monitoring commission, a body of international experts including one from this country who will be looking at whether par militarism has gone away or not and it will report in about three weeks time.  So that side of things hasn't improved enough in order to give the confidence to the parties that they need to live together.

The other phenomena not secured is that we had elections to the assembly last November and the elector picture, the geography of Northern Ireland has changed dramatically.  It's meant for example that Sinn Fein is now the major of the two nationalists party, John Hume's last year had 18 seats and Jerry Adams' Sinn Fein is 24.  On the other side of the equation David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party that is staying at 24 seats but the big winner there was Ian Pearson's party going up to 33 and so in a way those who were on the more extreme ends of the policies actually were the victors in the election.  I think that the parties in Northern Ireland will come together and resolve their issues eventually.  I don't know how long it will take.  The quicker the better as far as I'm concerned because at the moment my job now as well as the normal job I would have in dealing with the politics and security in Northern Ireland I now have to run the schools and the hospitals and my ministers and all the other public services there when in reality those issues should be dealt with by the locally elected politicians accountable to local people. 

The other issue which is absolutely vital is the policing of Northern Ireland.  Over the years gone by the police in Northern Ireland did not have the confidence of the whole community.  Rightly or wrongly that was the case and so policing was a major part of the Good Friday Agreement.  When I went off to become the Secretary of State for Wales having left Northern Ireland and that job and returned to this one some two years later the biggest change I saw was the change in policing.  They have a new chief constable ______ who is doing an excellent job there.  He used to be with the Metropolitan Police in London.  Then we have Catholics who now happen to run the police in Northern Ireland, the Policing Board.  We also have Catholics on local management committees, too, who hold district peace partnerships.  Six hundred Catholics have joined the police over the last number of years because the arrangements are now that there has to be 50-50 recruitment policy.  So that for every Protestant that is recruited to the police force, you have to recruit a Catholic, too.  So you increase the number of Catholics in the police force itself to improve the acceptability and confidence of the force.  And that's been a huge change.  The one missing factor is, of course, Sinn Fein has joined.  The STLP with the encouragement of the Catholic Church and the Irish government did in fact joined up to the policing arrangements but Sinn Fein still won't do it for reasons that they will describe to you if you dare to ask them. 

Now, we've also had difficulties with Catholics who are in the police force and who are helping to run it because they have been targeted particularly by the so-called dissidents Republicans, those who broke away from the IRA, who are burning the cars and putting pipe bombs near the houses of those Catholics who have the courage to join up to the policing arrangements and the lead on Wednesday, the President, George Bush, met some of those people who have been intimidated and wished them well in what they did.  And so, it's not an easy the situation that we face in Northern Ireland.  It never will be.  We all knew all of this.  George Mitchell said when he chaired that final session of the talks and wished us well in Northern Ireland.  That we actually agreed to the agreement was almost the easy bit.  It was implementing the agreement that was the difficult bit and so I'm afraid it has been.  So, it's gone a bit like this – up and down – all the time over the last number of years but so it was to be expected.  It's in a big one of those at the moment but I'm hoping that it will come up a bit the other way in the months ahead. 

What ultimately makes me the optimist and I don't underestimate the problems that we face at the moment and we have to tackle that paramilitary operation because we can't have that sort of activity in a modern democracy.  But you then look at the big picture, too.  All the parties there want to get shot of me so that they can run their own affairs.  They want devolution back.  When you look at how people live their lives in Northern Ireland compared to how they lived those lives six or seven years ago then there is a huge change in that.  People are at work in a way they weren't before -- only four percent unemployment in Northern Ireland.  In other words, 96 percent of those eligible to work are working.  Huge difference from what it had been in the past.  There has been a 25 percent increase in tourism in Northern Ireland since the agreement.  More people now come as tourists in Northern Ireland than live in Northern Ireland – 1.7 million visited the place and I heartily recommend all the delights and attractions of Northern Ireland to you despite what is said and when you come to Ireland visit the north because it's now a marvelous place to have a holiday.  That's changed, too.  In addition to that the way in which people go about their business – like you and I would here in this city or elsewhere, going to the shops, to a restaurant for a meal, go to church, go to a public house and have a pint of Guinness, whatever it might be – you couldn’t do those things seven years ago without fear of being bombed or attacked or killed or maimed.  If you went into a major department store and had to be searched all the time, every time you went into it.  The streets of Belfast would be closed off, scares all the time.  Those days are gone.

Most significantly of all those things whereas, I think, last year we had something like seven people who died as a result of terrorist activity -- seven too many, but seven nevertheless, at the height of the troubles in the mid-70s, five hundred people a year were dying because of bomb outrages and so on and so forth.  So those changes are absolute and I believe that ultimately the people of Northern Ireland will not go back to what they experienced for thirty or forty years.  I don't think for one second that the politicians in Northern Ireland will give up on the press for political stability there.  When we meet at ________ Castle in Northern Ireland on Tuesday despite there will be immense disagreements between people in those parties about how to deal with these issues but I sometimes quote the example to people of we asked these politicians in Northern Ireland from both sides to work with each other is that I would never for instance join in a coalition with the conservative party because it's not my party.  I'm a Labor politician, I wouldn't do that and yet I am asking – or we in the British government are asking – people from political parties who have not only differed politically over the last thirty or forty years, but have differed violently in what's happened to work together and the reality was for a number of years they have done it and they have been ministers together which astounded the world. 

So, those are the difficulties and though there are problems ahead of us, thank God we are nevertheless in a bumpy way going on the right direction.  But we need all the support we can get from our friends here in the United States and elsewhere to encourage people to make that deal.  That's one of the reasons why I'm here in the United States this year and that's one of the reasons why I accepted the great privilege of talking to this distinguished council and I'm grateful to you for giving me the opportunity and I will be more than happy to see if I can answer any questions that you might throw at me.

Thank you very much.