 Thanks very much, Maeve. It's a great pleasure to be here and thank you for inviting me. The last occasion I spoke in this room, there was a big podium just here. I was able to put my speech on the podium, read it, and then take, I think it was two or three questions at the end. But Maeve tells me that this is more informal, but I have to try and remember the notes I wrote. So bear with me with that. The topic that you gave me, Maeve, was to talk about how the template of the Northern Ireland peace process can contribute to international peace building. The troubles, as they were known, lasted really for 30 years. Book ended, I suppose, by the start of the civil rights marches in 1968, and then I suppose ending with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. And in that 30-year period, 3,600 people were killed, men, women, and children. I'm a little uncomfortable talking about figures and averages and that type of thing because every individual who was killed, person with their own individual story, family, friends, a life taken from them. But for the purposes of what I want to talk about tonight, I need just to talk a little bit about the figures. If you take the 30-year period, 3,600 works out about an average of something over 100 per year. And the reason that I'm giving that figure is that if you take that as a kind of a baseline, 100 casualties, 100 deaths per year, over the last 12 months, there have been 41 different conflicts around the world where more than 100 people have been killed. Some of the best-known conflicts in the world, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, like the conflict in the Burma-Myanmar, like the Colombian conflict that I'm now working on, are actually at the bottom end of that lead chain. In 14 of the 41, each of 14 of the 41, over 1,000 people have been killed. And in the worst four, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Boko Haram insurgency in Africa, and, of course, Syria, over 10,000 people have been killed in Syria alone, more than 50,000 people, over a 12-month period. So looking around the world, we're looking at a world at the moment which is quite riddled with conflict. One of the things that struck me really, as I'm sure many of you have been last year this year, about the start of the First World War, that period 100 years ago, one of the things that struck me was how relatively peaceful the world was in June of 1914, just before the assassination in Saudi Arabia, which of course sparked off the First World War and then the Second World War that came after it. The other, I suppose, contrast between that First World War and now is the nature of conflict. In the First World War, more than 90% of the casualties were soldiers. By the end of the Second World War, over 90% of the casualties were civilians. And now, not only are civilians the overwhelming majority of casualties and conflicts, they are in many respects the cannon fodder of the conflict themselves, the attack, for example, recently in Brussels, attacks directly using civilians as weapons of war. So what we have at the moment, I think, is a world which is very badly affected by conflict, where I think that there is a very strong imperative, not just for the peoples of the countries who are affected by conflict itself, but for the international community as a whole to work on the urgent task of peacemaking and peace building. And in that context, Northern Ireland is seen around the world as a rare example of a peace process that has actually worked. I'm struck when I travel to Colombia about the numbers of times that Northern Ireland is mentioned as an example of a peace process that actually succeeded internationally, seen as a case where a very deep conflict was brought to a conclusion by negotiation, where the main perpetrators of that conflict were got to work together in government and running of their country. And so the outside world, at least, Northern Ireland appears to be a place that is peaceful, that is prospering, where people are having a better quality of life, and the relationship between Ireland and Britain is seen as enormously improved. And therefore, the question is often then raised about what Northern Ireland, or the example of Northern Ireland, or the lessons of Northern Ireland, can bring to peace building and to peacemaking throughout the world. I'm reluctant to use the word temptate because every conflict is different. Causes of conflicts are different. The nature of the conflict is that circumstances are different. And therefore, I don't think you can talk of a template that can be simply transferred from the circumstances of Northern Ireland to the circumstances of another conflict. But what there has been in Northern Ireland has been an experience of resolving conflict, which I think certainly is a source of inspiration for those who want to see conflicts result. But it's also, I think, there are many lessons to be learned from it. I see the Northern Ireland peace process as not something that began in August 1994 when the IRA declared their ceasefire and that ended on Good Friday in 1998 when the peace agreement was signed. I see it as a much longer process and probably longer than some people regard it. I can identify six phases of it. I just want to talk about those kind of six phases where I think there's relevance for each of those phases for other conflicts, particularly for those that I'm working on in Colombia. The first phase is what I call the foundation phase. And in a way, it had started before the first shot was ever fired in the troubles in 1969. And that is the foundation, I think, that is built from the fact that the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland, as people everywhere, didn't want conflict in the first place. They wanted to live a peaceful life. The leaders and the organizers of the right movement in the late 60s and early 70s never wanted to see their demand for reforms in Northern Ireland degenerate into what became a nasty sectarian conflict, defined very much by national identity and by religion. And one of the interesting, I think, factors in the whole Northern Ireland experience was throughout the entire period of the troubles, the strong voices that were expressed at different stages and that mobilized at different stages to demand peace. And I remember in the early 70s, there was the peace movement, Maureen Corrigan and Betty Williamson, Kieran McCow, after a number of children were killed by a car where some of the people had been shot, and big mobilization of people. The Congress of Trade Union had a better life for all campaign, USI peace jobs progress campaign. There were big mobilization of people demanding peace, following the Warrington bombing, following the bombing in Anas Gilam. There was the peace train movement in the late 80s, early 90s. There were different expressions, public expressions and mobilized expressions of citizens of the country who demanded peace. And that later foundation created, a constituency for peace, on which the peace agreement was resolved. And for example, when Sinn Fein began to develop their armalite and ballot box strategy and began to move from the armalite to the ballot box, I think what they found was a constituency of people. Their electoral support were people who at the end of the day wanted the conflict to end and wanted a peaceful society. And I believe that that had a big influence in the shift in thinking, which took place throughout the 80s and the 90s. That phase, if you like, that foundation phase exists in other countries. It exists, for example, in Colombia. There is very much a big population and a big constituency for peace. And it does find political expression in the politics of the country. There are places, of course, where you cannot find such expression. Difficult, for example, to imagine that you could have a mobilization of people in Damascus, calling on ISIS, and assigned to back up. So it doesn't necessarily exist, that's where. But it was an important, I think, precondition for the peace process in Northern Ireland to get off the ground. The second phase that I identify is what's called the informal talks phase. This is where there's sounding out informal contact between officials of government and, in the case of Northern Ireland, the IRA and the loyalist paramilitary organizations. It went on for quite a long period of time, even as far back as the early 70s, there were informal contacts between officials of the British government and the IRA to see if there was some way that could be got to build the conflict to an end. Over the decades of the conflict, there were continuing contacts between Irish officials and British officials between each other for a start. Irish diplomats working within Northern Ireland sounding out opinion there and seeing what was possible. The work that was done by people like, for example, Father Alec Reid, who brought together people in the church to sound out how they might be able to move forward, the human-adorned discussions in the early 90s, which laid the basis. And that is a very critical part of the building of peace, because it is what actually gets the participants to the table in the first place. And that sometimes can be difficult, because by definition, very often, guerrilla movements, revolutionary movements have already rejected politics and talk for armed action. So getting them to come to the table means sometimes that they have to confront some of their own sport mates who consider their leadership maybe going a bit soft. If they're talking about getting into negotiations with government. And similarly, there is the difficult side of government about the whole argument about talking to terrorists in the first place. So that informal discussion is very important. There was quite a degree of informal discussion in the case of Colombia. Some of it was brokered by the governments of Norway and Cuba who managed to get some of the participants talking informally to each other. Important stage to, first of all, get the parties to the table, agree what the conditions are, but get the parties to the table, and also agree the broad agenda that has to be addressed. The third phase, then, is the form of negotiations themselves. And of course, in Northern Ireland, that was the period from 1994 to 98. Interestingly enough, the period of time in Colombia is about the same. It's kind of a four year kind of spread. If, as we hope, that there will be an agreement in Colombia this year, it will be four years since those talks began in 2012. I think the period of time is purely coincidental, but there were things that happened in both sets of negotiations, which I think are quite similar. Like, for example, the stark nature of the talks, the breakdown of the talks, the breakdown, for example, of the early ceasefire in 1996 with the Canary Wharf bombing, and then some of the bombing, like Manchester, for example, the bombing of the shopping centre on the Saturday morning. Episodes like that, which caused the talks to stall and they had to pick up back up on track again. And I think there were two or three things, I think, that were key in the Northern Ireland talks, which I think again are reflected in the Colombia talks. First of all, I think was the determination of the participants in the talks, that they were going to stick with it and persist with it, and the things broke down in the background on track again. Secondly, I think, was the role of the mediators. In the case of Northern Ireland, George Mitchell. The Colombian mediating situation is somewhat different. There isn't a single mediator like George Mitchell sharing the talks. The government of Norway and Cuba are facilitating the talks and acting as brokers and they have people who work with the participants in the talks, but they work very strongly when things break down to get them back on track again. And then there is the support of the wider international community that encourages them to get back to the table. I suppose the critical element in getting an agreement is that the participants have to be willing to reach an agreement, they have to be willing to make the compromises that are necessary. The principal commit participants in the case of Northern Ireland were the political parties in Northern Ireland, including those who had links and associations with paramilitary organizations. The two governments, I think of the course in the case of Northern Ireland, and this is where I think it differs from the Colombian situation. The Northern Ireland settlement involved the three slands of talks, the internal formula for Northern Ireland itself, the relationships between North and South, which had to be a work through between the two sovereign governments and of course the relationships between Britain and Ireland, all of which had to be needed together. So the two governments played a key role in that stage. You then reached the great moment, good Friday agreement in Ireland, when those were old enough to remember, as we'll recall, the big media moment, a big occasion in Stormont, where all of the participants were there, and I'm sure all of you have seen the film footage of that. And in many ways, that becomes the kind of the memory of the piece, but that is the piece moment. When will that happen in Colombia? We hope it will happen this year. I hope it will happen before the summer of this year. There was a target date which had been set, which was the 23rd of March. Interestingly, I don't think there's anything to do with the Northern Ireland peace process, but it was also Easter. Has it happened Easter weekend this year? But it didn't happen. A lot of progress was made within Havana that week. An interesting week in Havana for other reasons, because of course it was also the visit of President Obama to Cuba, I started visiting Cuba on that particular week. But as it happened, the final agreement wasn't concluded on that date. There were issues that just couldn't be resolved by that time. But talks have resumed again, and I'm hopeful that they will reach a conclusion hopefully by the summer. In a way, that's just the start of probably the more difficult part of the work, which is then the incrementing, ratifying, incrementing, and consolidating the peace. The first thing that has to be done is what you do with the agreement. It's only a document. It has to be those who have been involved in the conflict have to buy into it, in the case of Northern Ireland. It wasn't just the case of the political leaders who were in Stormant negotiating it, who had to agree it. IRA members on the ground had to buy into it. Loyalist paramilitaries had to buy into it. And of course, there was also a requirement that the public, because we live in a democracy, people of the country, also had to approve it. And here, it was done by way of a referendum. There were three, I suppose, reasons for the holding of that referendum. The first was in the South. There was a constitutional requirement who were going to change articles two and three of Bunrath and Neheron, to change the constitutional claim over Northern Ireland, which was expressed in those articles, to a more statement of an aspiration for unity. That could only be done by a referendum. The IRA needed it for ideological reasons, because they justified their campaign on the basis that they were the inheritors of the last occasion, which was the election of the Second Dáil, that the Irish people had made an act of self-determination as a total, but the Irish people in the whole had made this act of self-determination. This was a referendum North and South on the peace agreement was going to provide them with a new act of self-determination by the Irish people as a whole, which justified them abandoning the campaign and giving up the weapons. And of course, the third reason was to provide political validation for the agreement so that from that point onwards, anybody proposing to use violence, use the gun and pursue political objectives, were doing so in defiance of the wish of the Irish people, without the wish of the Irish people that had been expressed in that referendum. President Santos, who has, as they used to say, taken a lot of risks for peace in Colombia, wants a plebiscite to give popular approval or public approval for the peace agreement when it is concluded in Colombia. That is not yet agreed. First of all, at the negotiations themselves. And secondly, there is some political opposition within the country to the holding of a referendum, and particularly to the kind of referendum that he is proposing. Former President Uribe, in particular, who has been an opponent, although he was somebody who engaged in discussions nearly when he was president, he has actually been opposing the peace process of President Santos and he's opposing the holding of a referendum. But President Santos has made it clear that he intends to hold a referendum or a plebiscite. So if, for example, there is a conclusion to the Colombian talks by the summer, I would expect that there would be a referendum or a plebiscite in the autumn. The fifth phase, then, is the implementation. Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland process has been successfully implemented, or most of it anyway, but very slowly. And indeed, that is one of the, I suppose, cautions that people elsewhere have when they look to the Northern Ireland experience as a kind of precedent for their own peace process, the length of time that it has taken to implement it. The institutions, for example, which were established under the Good Friday Agreement, really the Assembly and Executive did not get to operate on a continuing basis until 2007. I mean, that in between times it had been suspended on a number of occasions. There had been a lot of stop-starts in getting the institutions to start. And it really wasn't until 2007 when the DUP in Sinn Fein became the two largest parties in the Assembly that it became more stable and had continued pretty well since then without interruption. The decommissioning weapons didn't start until 2001, three years after the agreement. It wasn't completed until 2005, seven years after the agreement. Similarly, the reform of police, the devolution of policing functions to Northern Ireland didn't, wasn't completed until 2010, 12 years after the agreement. And issues relating to the past and victims and their needs. Only recently, a formula has been agreed at Storm and House Agreement in 2014 to deal with that. In Colombia, the plan is to implement the agreement much more rapidly. And to that end, the government has already established a dedicated ministry for post-conflict with a minister, Rafael Pardo, who might have met on a number of occasions. And their job would be to coordinate the implementation of it. They have identified, Minister Pardo has identified, 18 priorities for implementation once the agreement is signed. And it's really on the implementation that the European Union sees its role in supporting the process and the agreement. My function is largely to support that implementation. One of the areas which we've identified for early implementation is demining. Colombia is the second most mined country in the world, second only to Afghanistan. Large parts of the countryside have been, you know, a lot of these kind of crude, handmade mines have been planted in them. The European Union has already supported two pilot projects, demining where both FARC and the Colombian Army are working together on the demining project. I visited one of those in my last visit to Colombia in Mehta. And it was interesting to see the FARC commanders identify the areas where the mines have been planted and then the Army and FARC with international support work together to try and get them out of the ground. It's a slow process. It's a very dangerous process, but it's one that's very necessary. And I expect that the European Union would provide additional funding to support that. When Federica Mogherini appointed me as the EU Special Envoy for the Peace Process in Colombia, it was particularly to work in support of implementation. And I've been out there on three occasions since November when I was appointed, meeting with people at political level, at government level, but also meeting opposition leaders, meeting people in civil society, NGOs, and so on, to try and get a very comprehensive picture of what needs to be done once the agreement is signed. The agreement itself, I expect, will be a very comprehensive agreement, much more comprehensive than the Northern Ireland agreement, ranging from rural development, political participation, how to deal with victims. And interestingly enough, in the case of Colombia, victims were involved in the actual negotiations with representatives of the victims, attended the negotiations, and I think there is a much stronger sense of the needs of the public in the Colombian agreement than it was in the Northern Ireland agreement. That, of course, will be necessary because the scale of the Colombian conflict is much larger than Northern Ireland. Over 50 years, 220,000 people have been killed, 6 million people have been displaced from their homes. That's on a massive scale, and it will take quite a lot to implement it. European Union has decided to establish a trust fund to support implementation. Nine member states, including Ireland, have agreed so far to become part of that trust fund. The budget will be important in providing support for the implementation. There will be other funds, like, for example, the United Nations will have a trust fund, the United States are putting in some funding. But at the end of the day, the international money will only be a small fraction of what is going to be required to implement it. The resources for implementation will largely have to be Colombian resources. I think the importance of the international funding is not just the money. It's the statement that it makes, and we know, for example, from our own experience, that the international fund for Ireland, for example, yes, the money was important, the projects that it supported were important, but even more important was the statement that that fund said to Ireland that there was international support, that it was expressed in practical terms, and that it was there, not just financially, but also politically as well. And that's part of what we're doing on the Colombian process. First of all, the final phase is the consolidation, which is really what's happening at the moment in Northern Ireland with elections again for Northern Ireland assembly. It's still a work in progress. I don't think it can be taken for granted. There are risks to the Northern Ireland peace process, the continuing activity and presence of dissidents in particular. The fact that Northern Ireland is still a very divided society, with 50 peace walls in Belfast, for example, which physically divided communities on sectarian lines. So I don't think there's any grounds for complacency, and certainly not for a degree of self-congratulation. But it is, I think, an experience that I think we can promote as a country. I think we can promote more, particularly in addressing conflict situations abroad. And it's also, I think, an experience that sits well with the way in which Irish foreign policy has been pursued down the decades. We have developed as a country a reputation for the making of peace and for the building of peace, and the Northern Ireland experience is part of that. But it's not the only experience, the huge reputation, for example, that the Irish Defence Forces have in peace missions for the United Nations in particular, more recently, European Union training missions. The work that has been done by NGOs and by development agencies, the aid work that has been done, the work of Irish diplomacy and the reputation that it has throughout the world. Evidence, a couple of years ago, for example, the overwhelming vote that Ireland caught in the election for the UN Human Rights Council. The kind of historic work that Ireland has done, going back work, for example, Frank Aiken on the UN, on nuclear disarmament back to the 1950s, to more recently the work that David Dunno, who our ambassador in the United Nations, did on the sustainable development goals last year, has given this country a very strong reputation in the area of peace building. And it's therefore been a great privilege for me to have been asked by Federico Mulcarini to draw on that experience, to draw on the Irish experience of peace building, to work on the peace process on behalf of the European Union in Colombia. I want to express my thanks to my successor, Charlie Flanagan, who has been very supportive to me in that role and indeed to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who has been enormously supportive to the work that I'm doing. Thank you.