The Minister for Foreign Affairs has said the equality agenda in the Belfast Agreement offers the best safeguard to unionists as well as nationalists against domination by the other community.
At the Institute of British-Irish Studies at UCD last night, Mr Cowen paid tribute to Mr David Trimble for stating in his Nobel prize acceptance speech that Northern Ireland had been "a cold house for Catholics". The task now, he said, was to ensure that it was a cold house for nobody who lived there.
This could best be achieved through early implementation of equality measures in the accord. He believed unionist concern about equality did not spring from opposition to the concept itself.
"I think their concern comes from a suspicion that the equality enshrined in the Good Friday agreement is ultimately a ploy to enable one domination to be replaced by another.
"In that pessimistic view, Northern Ireland is implacably destined to be a chilly abode for one side or another, and it follows logically, exactly as in the past, that the only decision is to decide for whom." Mr Cowen said the agreement could "transcend that 'either/or' mind set and avoid the pernicious trap of the zero sum outlook.
"It is based on that that equality is not inherently a nationalist gain or a unionist loss, or vice versa. It is the inevitable condition for stability and a democratic society."
For this reason the implementation of the agreement should be "fast-forwarded", he said.