IRISH Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney finished what he started from the same spot he was forced to leave more than six months ago following a loyalist hoax bomb alert.
The minister abandoned his address at the John and Pat Hume Foundation event in March, approximately six weeks before an election and with no functioning executive.
“Politics is failing people right now,” Mr Coveney told the audience at the Houben Centre, part of the Holy Cross Passionist complex on the Crumlin Road in north Belfast.
“Northern Ireland has no first minister, no deputy first minister, no executive, no functioning assembly,” he said.
It “faces the possibility if not likelihood of a second election in the space of a year, an election...nobody wants.” An election could happen in about six weeks.
The Building Common Ground event saw the minister share the platform with the independent East Derry MLA Claire Sugden.
Also speaking at the event, Fr Gary Donegan, formerly of Holy Cross parish, said: “It is well documented how the last meeting ended so I am especially delighted that you all took the courage to return."
The foreign minister opened his remarks: “Hello again and thank you for coming back.”
He added: “I did not get a chance to say in person when we last met but I do want to say that I am genuinely sorry that my presence here on the last occasion ended the way it did.
“An innocent man, a working electrician called out on a job was hijacked at gun point and forced to drive his van here, thinking he was carrying explosive device.”
A family funeral next door at Holy Cross was disrupted also, he reminded the audience, adding it was “futile, cowardly exercise in community control” that served no-one and had no good purpose.
He addressed the paramilitaries directly, stating that their clinging to violence scares “uplift and investment” away while stifling the political voice of communities.
“Take a look at your children and ask yourself do you want them to turn out like you,” Mr Coveney said.
Mr Coveney, in apparent reference to recent comments by first minister designate Michelle O'Neill, added: “To those who might suggest there was no alternative to violence at the outset of the conflict, John and Pat’s life and legacy shows that there was, and is always, an alternative to violence.”
He argued also that the people on the island can enrich each other by “our differences” but added people need to be won over.
"Cheap glorification of past violence wins no friends...it reinforces division, it hurts people and it does nothing to build the kind of communities we want to live in.”
He called on people to “stop the whataboutery” that “prevents us calling out unacceptable behaviour in a clear way”. He did not specifically mention the pro-IRA chanting by the Irish women's soccer team, at Dublin and the west Belfast Féile.
The minister made clear he aspired to a united Ireland, arguing it could be “transformative, positive for the lives of people of all identities here”.
But it has to be agreed, imagining a new island as “peaceful, modern, diverse, outward looking...perhaps a new flag, a new constitution...something truly inspiring”.
MLA Claire Sugden thanked the minister for returning and made clear those who forced his leaving the last time are not representative of unionists.
She added the Good Friday Agreement allows her to be both "British and Irish". Her Britishness is hugely important, Ms Sugden said, but she shared much with all Irish people of Ireland.
Her view is that the people of Northern Ireland would be a much better place remaining with the UK and suggested there was an attitude among some a united Ireland is "predetermined".
