SCOPE OF AGREEMENT:THE SHEER scale and complexity of the talks on the Belfast Agreement were not fully comprehended by those outside them, former Northern secretary Paul Murphy told the special symposium on the Belfast Agreement.
Crediting George Mitchell on the scope of his task, he said: "Parties dealt with parties. Governments with governments, parties with governments, other government people with other parties." The process overseen by Mr Mitchell was "very multilayered" he said.
Sir Reg Empey agreed, adding it was also little understood what pressure unionist felt themselves to be under.
He compared the gathering of talks participants to the placing together of the victims of 9/11 and the perpetrators from al-Qaeda in the same room.
A vital component, all participants in the symposium agreed, was the ability of each delegation to respect everyone else.
"If you view the person on the other side as human and not as 'them against us' you open your mind and you seen them differently," Mr Mitchell said.
"That is an essential step and that is what happened here."
The secret to the agreement, Mr Mitchell said, was to calculate how much each side would need to get in the accord to enable them to swallow that which they did not like, but which other parties insisted on.
He borrowed the phrase "trust crept in" but modified it to suggest "understanding crept in".
PUP leader Dawn Purvis said also that "humanness crept in", adding humorously that new contact by loyalists with Sinn Féin members proved to her that "republicanism is not contagious".
Lord Alderdice observed that trust "was an outcome of the process, not a prerequisite of it".
Gerry Adams said there was little prospect of people doing business if one side regarded the other as "terrorists".
He said unionists were like nationalists and republicans in at least one sense - they both believed in getting together to decide on the governance of the place, regardless of how that was going to be done.
BBC presenter Noel Thompson asked why unionists "hated" former Northern secretary Mo Mowlam and why the British government eventually sidelined her.
Sir Reg Empey denied she was hated but accepted her relationship with the Ulster Unionists was "frosty". "She was not a detail person, she was a big-picture person," he said, and it was this which led David Trimble to insist he dealt directly with the prime minister.
Dawn Purvis said other unionists, and those in her party, thought she was "a gem".
Prof Monica McWilliams disagreed about Dr Mowlam's ability to deal with detail.
"She should never become a footnote" in the history of the conclusion of the accord.
She recalled the Northern secretary working throughout the night before the agreement was concluded, walking from party delegation to delegation with a drip in her arm to combat the pain that went with her condition.
The Taoiseach admitted there were many walkouts and many difficult scenes with people "flipping the lid".
"But they always came back the next morning and they were sane again."
In particular, he credited David Trimble with handling the intense pressure he was under in making what was "a very difficult call".
Mark Durkan said the Good Friday deal proved to him that people cannot find security "against" each other. "You can only find security with each other."
Gerry Adams recalled George Mitchell commenting to him that, on achieving the agreement, "That's the easy bit. The hard part will be implementing it."
"The Good Friday agreement was an accommodation which came out of a long and tortuous process and it is still a work in progress," Mr Adams said.