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Terrorism (Northern Ireland) Bill

The hon. Gentleman gives one example of many that at times serve to undermine our confidence that the Government have a joined-up understanding of the problems of terrorism. I happen to believe that terrorists are on the whole motivated, and that it is the failure of politicians to understand those motivations that causes such a disparity of behaviour in what we have seen in Northern Ireland and what we have seen elsewhere. The suffering of the Province is a record of what results from the ignorance of prejudice and the consequence when politics fails to listen to the causes. At a time when we seem at last to have learned the lessons from that lethal tragedy in one place, how depressing it is to see the very same calamity repeated in our treatment of the very same set of affairs in regard to the terrorist threat from abroad. As the Minister said earlier, the powers in the Bill are exceptional and time limited. In Northern Ireland it took 30 years—some would say hundreds of years—for us to find the courage to attend to the underlying motivations of the terrorists that now lead us to time-limit regulations and legislation that is hopefully now at the tail end of the troubles that have bedevilled the Province. How many more years will it take for us and the Government to learn the same lessons for the rest of the world? Why is it so hard to see that international terrorists are motivated just as were the republican terrorists and loyalist terrorists of yesterday?