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Northern Ireland Act 2000 (Modification) Order 2006

I thank the Minister for outlining the background to the order and offer him a word of support. I am an admirer of his. I do not agree with a lot of his policies, but I agree with the robust fashion in which he puts things forward. It suits the Northern Ireland personality. The noble Lord needs support on approval for the proposed changes in planning which he announced for consultation last week. I think that most people in Northern Ireland will support them. We are discussing, for the seventh time, the suspension of the Assembly. I have a deep suspicion that we will be back again, discussing this issue, on quite a number of occasions. I welcome the Minister’s remarks that we have to look at different ways of helping to streamline and make better and more representative the arrangements for the governance of Northern Ireland while there is no Assembly. In that light, and in terms of Statutory Instrument 1999/859, which sets up the cross-border implementation bodies, will the Minister and the Government be prepared to support an amendment that I will table to the Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill currently before the House of Commons to clarify where money can be spent by the language bodies? As it stands, those people who are not sympathetic to the Ulster Scots language and culture in Northern Ireland—and there seem to be some in the Civil Service—are using some ambiguous wording in Part 5 to stop the funding of Ulster Scots language and culture outside the island of Ireland. That puts the agency at a discriminatory disadvantage compared with any other cross-border body. I am sure that this is simply a piece of bad drafting and the noble Lord and the Government should support me in my amendment to the miscellaneous provisions Bill. The order referred to the interdependence of the functions of the Assembly and the north-south council, which are inter-related, and the success of each depends on that of the other. We have not had an assembly for nearly four years and the cross-border bodies are trundling on in a half-hearted way, doing nothing particularly spectacular. What is their future? I have spoken before in this Room and in the House about some of the evils of those bodies, and I do not wish to spend too much time referring again to Waterways Ireland, where there is bullying, appointing staff without competition and about which the Minister has been incorrectly informed so that he informs Parliament of incorrect information. But I have discovered another cross-border body that is causing even more angst: Inter Trade Ireland. It is difficult to quantify any of its results. Its job is to try to create trade between the north and the south of Ireland. It is difficult to find out what that body does and what results it has produced. I note that it receives a budget of some £9 million a year and that some £3 million of that is spent on salaries and overheads. It has 42 staff, of which five are Protestant and the rest are obviously Roman Catholic.  Thus 11 per cent of the    workforce is Protestant, which is completely disproportionate to the population of Northern Ireland, or any part of it, except some small areas. Protestant people who are employed by Inter Trade Ireland now believe themselves to be under pressure and have written to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland on that issue. Why are they under pressure? In its recruitment attempt a couple of years ago, Inter Trade Ireland managed to have no regard to the Northern Ireland recruitment laws and put ads in the local paper that were incorrectly worded. The taxpayer, who we are supposed to look after, had to pay for an entire re-run of the recruitment drive. It would probably have been easier if Inter Trade Ireland had put a notice on the gates of its establishment stating, ““Protestants need not apply””. We did not sign up to the Belfast agreement to have that sort of governance. We did not sign up to the Belfast agreement to have the community from which we come disadvantaged. We did not sign up to a set of cross-border bodies that have no way of saying what they are doing. We did not sign up for bullying, for people being appointed without open competition, or for lies being told through the Minister—that is not the noble Lord’s fault in any shape or form—to this Parliament. If it is possible that the Assembly will not exist for much longer, let us hope that the cross-border bodies go the same way. I gave the Minister notice of one issue: the financing of political parties in Northern Ireland. There has been a little controversy about the method of funding of parties over here. I have noticed that in the media over the past few days. The Government announced on Monday that they will look at the ways that parties are funded and I am keen for that to include Northern Ireland, where, unfortunately for reasons that I do not fully understand, the funding of political parties is on a different basis. You do not have to disclose where the money comes from. That was to satisfy the wishes of Sinn Fein/IRA, who like money coming in from the United States. Exactly why Sinn Fein/IRA need money—