The following are edited extracts from the speech by Mr Mark Durkan, SDLP leader and Deputy First Minister at Béal na mBlath, Co Cork, yesterday:
It is a huge honour, but an even greater challenge, for me to stand before you today to deliver this oration.
From different political perspectives and different parts of Ireland, we have gathered here this week to pay tribute to Michael Collins. We mark the 80th anniversary of his death - still only a lifetime ago.Today, we must look forward, not backwards. We can best serve the hopes and ideals of Michael Collins and we can best fulfil the best contribution of other leaders by delivering the prospectus of the Good Friday Agreement.
In achieving and promoting the agreement, we did not pretend that it would automatically end dispute or distrust. We never assumed that consensus or reconciliation would be inevitable.
However, it does, for the first time in our history, offer a democratic common denominator between unionist and nationalist, loyalist and republican, non-unionist and non-nationalist.
Nationalists, unionists and others can and do have their very different preferences as to the constitutional status of the North. The agreement does not make unionists nationalists-in-waiting. Nor does it make nationalists unionists-in-waiting. But the agreement, properly looked at and properly worked at, can allow us to share and operate a new constitutional ethic transcending those differences.
A common constitutional ethic whose steady application can emancipate valuable co-operation and overdue concentration on the social, economic, environmental and cultural dimensions that can serve and involve us all.
Without diminishing anyone's identity, betraying any legitimate interest or forfeiting any aspiration.
This is the true import of the agreement. But we have still to make this its real impact. We must. We can. Let us now resolve we will.
But we must not only allay the fears of some about what might lie beyond the agreement. We must all address now the real fears for the agreement itself.
The agreement now faces difficulty and danger but it still offers us the best way of carrying us through these same straits.
Not unlike Collins and his colleagues who established the Garda Síochána, the SDLP has grasped the nettle of promoting civil policing for all our citizens, even in the midst of political uncertainty and continuing violence.
We took our seats on the inclusive Policing Board on the basis of what was in train from Patten and the specific commitments to amend the legislation which, with the Irish Government, we secured from the British government at Weston Park. We have, with others, made that board work. The British government must now make good on those commitments in proper order.
If we combine to consolidate the agreement, participating in all its arrangements, democratic leaders can use its operation as the common platform from which we repudiate the paramilitaries and confront sectarianism.
One of Collin's earliest ministerial tasks was to raise Ireland's First National Loan to build his republic. Similarly, I have seen the need for the North to break from its financial straitjacket to invest in much-needed infrastructure through the reinvestment and reform initiative with a new borrowing power.
Provided for in the agreement, but not yet achieved, is a charter open to signature by all democratic political parties, reflecting and endorsing agreed measures for the protection of the fundamental rights of everyone living in the island of Ireland. That charter should pose challenges for everybody - governments and political parties alike.
The charter should, for example, ensure an Ireland:
where the right to fair policing is matched by respect for the right to join the police;
where the right to trial by jury is matched by an end to back-street justice;
where the battle against sectarianism in the North is matched by the battle against racism in the South.
As we honour Michael Collins, a leader of such promise, who was tragically cut down, we should not fail to acknowledge today the Southern leaders of different parties who, in our time, have helped to achieve the progress we now share. Let me also acknowledge other pro-agreement parties and leaders in the North for positive steps they have taken as part of this process. No one will think it out of place that I should single out here two giants of Irish politics, John Hume and Séamus Mallon.
As we strive to create an Ireland befitting of its potential in the 21st century, we need no longer look backwards alone for the inspiration to carry us forward. We must look to ourselves and to each other. This is a new century. Together, we can now make this a new country.