They have a majority in the Assembly in Northern Ireland, and the votes and numbers in the Assembly are the important thing that matters. If the hon. Member for Antrim, North (Rev. Ian Paisley) will look, as I am sure he has done, at the appropriate part of Section (2)(b) of the Act he will notice that it refers to a majority of representation in the Assembly. That is what they have. This is one of the reasons why the previous Secretary of State was able to report the agreement which finally the present Secretary of State has been able to explain today.

I thank the Secretary of State for his remarks about finance. We think that it is most important to repeat the White Paper on financial affairs and the distribution of finance in Northern Ireland.

There are many other things one could say about the orders, although at the beginning, when Mr. Speaker was in the Chair, we said that the three orders all related to the Bill and the power-sharing arrangements set up in Northern Ireland.

I hope that it will be possible to have a wide-ranging debate, if only on the hook of the Act we are amending, certainly with regard to the powers to be under the control of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and that, as a result of the arrangements made this weekend, and to be formalised next year, there will be co-operation between North and South on the matters which will be under the control of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

I wish to mention the Council of Ireland, the Irish dimension. It was appropriate that the discussions should have been held last weekend at Sunning-dale but it is also important that we should have a chance to think more broadly of the Irish dimension. It was first mentioned in the Green Paper—what a break-through that was—and in the White Paper, and it is implicit in the Act. The new agreement last weekend was needed, if this is not the wrong phrase to use, to trigger off the devolution order.

On Sunday night I happened to be in a position to watch practically everybody who ever was anybody in the North commenting on Sunningdale. I was sitting in a BBC studio, it was all piped through and I could hear the comments before they went on the air. It would have made compulsive television viewing if the whole world could have seen it. The participants were not aware that this was happening.

I noticed the instant reaction by some people in the North and some in the South. The phrase used was "It is a sell-out"; used by the extreme loyalists in the North. The astonishing thing is that for utterly different reasons it was stigmatised as a sell-out by extreme Republicans in the South. It can be regarded as a sell-out by one or the other but not at the same time by two sets of people who disagree.

When I was in the South this week and met politicians of all parties, it struck me that one great advantage of the Sunning-dale talks was that they swept away some of the misunderstandings of the last 50 years. It was a great advantage for the politicians in the North and those in the South and representatives of the British Government to meet and talk. I should have thought that the bonus of that meeting was not just in the agreement that was reached. This was put to me by some politicians in the South.

The aspiration for unity is there and is understandable. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Antrim, North has, I presume temporarily, left the Chamber. I hope that we shall hear from him later on. It was absolutely right, as expressed in the White Paper, that those with aspirations for unity should be able to express them in all parts of the island of Ireland. Equally understandably, there is a need for those in the North who feel passionately about their link with the United Kingdom to be reassured on that. Those two points are not mutually exclusive, as was the case in the example I gave just now.

I am surprised that it has not been mentioned very much on this side of the water that paragraph 5 of the communiqué was divided into two parts alongside each other, not one beneath the other. It was explained to me, and reported as a result of the debates in the Dail yesterday, that it was meaningful that the Irish Government's acceptance of no change in status and the declaration on the United Kingdom link should be alongside one another.

There is one point on that which did not strike me when I first read the agreement at short notice. The last words of the right-hand paragraph are: If … the majority of the people of Northern Ireland should ever indicate a wish to become part of a united Ireland, the British Government would support that wish. This was regarded in the South as a significant change in the nomenclature which has applied over the years.

In any conference there has to be a great deal of give or there would be no point in it. I commend Irish politicians of all parties for the way in which they proceeded last week. The important thing is the acceptance of the status of Northern Ireland.

We do not need too detailed questions about the workings of the Council of Ireland, but I hope that, although its structure will need legislation in this House, we shall have a chance in the new year to look at the matter in greater depth. It is important that these issues should be raised, because much of the problem in Ireland is the murkiness which surrounds argument about the North and the South. The clearer we are on what is involved, the better it will be.

For example, we have to be clear about the unanimity rule and how it will work. When there is talk of appointing a Secretary-General, I wonder whether any part will be played in that by the British Government, or whether it will be left entirely—