This Joint Declaration is a charter for peace and reconciliation in Ireland.
Peace is a very simple, but also a very powerful idea, whose time has come.
The Joint Declaration provides from everyone's point of view a noble means of establishing the first step towards lasting peace with justice in Ireland. The central idea behind the Peace Declaration is that the problems of Northern Ireland, however deep and intractable, however difficult to reconcile, have to be resolved exclusively by political and democratic means. Its objective is to heal the divisions among the people of Ireland. The Declaration makes it clear that it is for the people of Ireland, North and South, to achieve agreement without outside impediment. The British Government have also declared that they will encourage, enable and facilitate such agreement, and that they will endorse whatever agreement emerges and take the necessary steps to implement it.