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Northern Ireland

My Lords, it is as much a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Laird, as it would have been to have followed the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis of Drumglass. Though the practice of your Lordships’ House of congratulating the noble colleague who has secured the debate, not only on having chosen the subject of the day, but also on the manner in which he or she introduced it is a cross between a ritual and a minuet, it is a particular pleasure to congratulate my noble friend Lady Park of Monmouth—which is a town that also gave the great monarch, Henry V, to the nation. My noble friend displays a continuing and constant interest in the affairs of the Province and demonstrates an encyclopaedic and contemporary knowledge that puts to shame some of us in your Lordships’ House who spent some of our political life in Northern Ireland. It is also apposite that it is my noble friend who should be the initiator of the first debate on Northern Ireland in your Lordships’ House since the publication of Mr Geoffrey Lewis’s seminal book Carson: The Man Who Divided Ireland, which, of course, in a suitably Irish paradox, he never wished to do. As previous speakers have said, we are delighted to welcome to this debate the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who is maintaining the tradition that the leadership core in your Lordships’ House should take responsibility for the Province’s affairs in our midst. Of course, the noble Lord has direct responsibility. As other noble Lords have done, I vicariously welcome the Secretary of State. He maintains the tradition of Welsh MPs, indeed, Welsh Secretaries of State, occupying Hillsborough Castle, although he possibly has less Celtic blood than his predecessor, Mr   Paul Murphy, who was generous with his time and judgment in talking to some of us who are interested in   developments in the province. Meanwhile, Mr   Woodward, the Parliamentary Secretary, is given to long speeches, which will make him very welcome in Ulster. If I may allude to one other former Northern Ireland Minister who has received preferment, I am delighted that Mr Desmond Browne—with whom I served in the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs in another place—has so rapidly reached the Cabinet, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, which he richly deserved to do. When I was first interviewed comprehensively in the Province, nearly 16 years ago, the Press Association representative in Belfast put it to me that the security situation in the Province was a Mexican standoff. If one substitutes the political situation for the security one, one could say that nothing much has changed in the past 16 years. One can feel sympathy for the noble Lord, and indeed for the Secretary of State, who had little to do with the Belfast agreement, but the Government did then make their bed, in what a great Ulster historian called the ““narrow ground””, and they have had to lie on it ever since. The only counsel that I would give to the Secretary of State is that, unlike Matthew Parris, who grew up in southern Africa, he should not think of the Unionists in terms of the Boers or the Afrikaners. A disproportionate amount of Irish literature—prose, poetry and drama—and Irish art is the work of those who were or are Unionists. He would start from the wrong perspective if he were to make that error and perhaps reading Mr   Lewis’s book on Carson would be a good alternative start. As to the consequences and repercussions of the Belfast agreement, I shall not dwell on the terms on which the prisoners were released without a quid pro quo, or, indeed, a punt pro quo or, even more lyrically, a euro pro quo. That lacuna remains one of the great might-have-beens of history. But the milk was long since been spilt and has long since gone sour. It is now itself a matter of history. But the condition in the agreement about using best efforts to get the terrorists to lay down arms is still with us, as the IRA, seven years after the agreement, carries out its debate about whether to disband. It remains my impression that, at least on the Republican side, there was a concordat that Mr   Adams and Mr McGuinness could get on with their politicking, provided that arms deals were not part of them. I am not saying that the concordat was necessarily written or stated. If it is true that within the Republican movement the ““need to know”” doctrine is ““bottom up””, rather than ““top down””—which the arrangements relating to the Northern Bank robbery seem to imply—ignorance can be a plus. As my former American employer once said:"““One of the strongest arguments for telling the truth, Peter, is that it is much easier to remember””." Likewise, denial is easier if one has no knowledge to deny. Today’s Mexican standoff in political terms is a consequence of that Byzantine policy. The letter of the agreement can be claimed to be intact, but the spirit is hopelessly fractured and it will take an age to pick up the pieces. As someone once said, the clock that strikes 13 not only contradicts itself but casts doubt on all previous statements. There are rumours that during the final negotiation of the agreement Mr Jeffrey Donaldson, whose Unionist position was perhaps the most hard line—perhaps a product of having been Enoch Powell’s agent, and his transfer to the DUP perhaps being a subsequent corroboration—was detached from the main negotiating body to have a bilateral meeting with, I believe, Mr Seamus Mallon and that by the time he returned the Unionists had agreed to gentler terms and wording than when he had left them. If that was so, it had the same incalculable consequences as though a French sharp-shooter at Waterloo had brought down the horse of General von Ziethen, the Prussian staff officer attached to Wellington’s staff, as he rode across the battlefield with the Duke’s urgent request that Prinz von Blucher take over the position of the British left which had not fired a shot all day, so that the British left could reinforce the British centre against the last hurrah of the Imperial Guard. The same sense of the spirit of the agreement, belonging in Sinn Fein’s eyes to a different document than that which others signed, emerges, as my noble friend Lady Park said, in the attitude of Sinn Fein towards what they call British justice, which has had malign consequences as regards their non-involvement in the Police Service of Northern Ireland. If Sinn Fein justice is a variant form, the case of the late Robert McCartney, both in his treatment before his death and in the experiences of his family since, is an ugly harbinger of what the so-called rule of law might become, not necessarily only north of the border. Ministers have a tough situation on their hands and it is particularly pertinent to wish them well. Whatever the Minister is able to tell us today will be welcome, but I would not wish him to feel any need to set out the Government’s negotiating stance in public. However, I would welcome him saying whether the Government are still minded, as they were before the election, to believe that the reduction in security levels does not adversely affect the collection of intelligence.