The former US President, Mr Bill Clinton, has said that despite setbacks in the peace process in Northern Ireland, the Belfast Agreement remained a model for the world.
"I think the agreement is alive," Mr Clinton, one of the chief architects of the agreement signed on Good Friday 1998, said in Derry yesterday. He was speaking at the Magee Campus of the University of Ulster, where Mr John Hume was inaugurated as the chair of peace studies.
Mr Clinton acknowledged the peace process had hit a difficult patch, with the suspension last year of the power-sharing institutions, but he said this would not last.
"There was a bit of a problem with implementation, it's just in a bit of a rut at the minute," he said.
"I ask you to stay the course and lead the world by your example," he told his audience, which included key participants in the peace process.
He said that in the long term he felt Northern Ireland had the political will to resolve its differences, and that it was much better off than other world trouble-spots hit by ethnic conflicts, such as Rwanda, Bosnia or East Timor.
"When the Middle East peace fell apart, when the future looked uncertain in Bosnia, when Africa was still reeling from losing 10 per cent of the people in Rwanda and two million died in the Congo, I could always point to the Good Friday accord.
"You need to think a long time before you give that up," Mr Clinton said.