Sir - I voted for the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. I believed I was voting for a clearly defined set of procedures, arrived at after protracted, inclusive negotiation, with definite, literal meanings. The agreement I voted for was, I believed, a complex agreement reached between two parties with much to gain by agreement but with compelling reasons to doubt each others' good faith.
The broad outlines of the agreement were given by the guarantees to the two Northern communities implicit in it. They were that Northern Ireland would retain its present political from, perhaps for ever, but that within it the nationalist community would be able to live, as they had not lived since 1920, like citizens of a modern, Western democracy.
I anticipated a rapid referendum, followed by two years of shared practical political activity, towards the end of which some way would be found to eliminate weapons from Irish politics, perhaps in the ways that the weapons of Fianna Fail, or of the Official IRA, had been eliminated. The model of disarmament favoured in the case of the B-Specials seemed feasible, but ultimately inappropriate. Nothing I knew about the problem led me to believe that two years was anything less than the safe minimum time required to achieve this.
Instead I am told that I voted for 18 months of argument about decommissioning, followed by an ultimatum from the Ulster Unionist party, enforced by a dubious procedure activated by the Secretary of State.
I did not vote for "political reality" as defined by the party whose conduct in power for over 40 years created the Northern Ireland problem in its modern form. Can anyone tell me who did? - Yours, etc., Frank Fitzpatrick,
Howth Road, Dublin 3.