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North Africa and the Near and Middle East

Is there not an instructive example from our own country, however, in the way in which we drew Sinn Fein and the IRA into the process of negotiation and eventually a settlement even while there was still some violence going on, and even while those organisations were still committed to the abolition of the Province of Northern Ireland and to its incorporation into the Irish state? That political issue was resolved only at the very end of the negotiations, with the signing of the Good Friday agreement. Does the hon. Lady not agree that we should be trying to draw Hamas into the democratic process and the negotiating process, and not setting preconditions that even we ourselves did not set in our own peace process?