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Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill

I apologise: not only is the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon) known to have one of the best legal brains in the House, she is also unfailingly courteous and charming, and I understand the motivation behind her amendment. However, I have no such inhibition about amendment No. 22, in the name of the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson). With her amendment No. 31, the hon. Member for North Down has moved the debate on from the minutiae of who did what to whom, in what guise and wearing what colours on a Good Friday late in the previous century. Instead, the amendment focuses on the core question of what we are trying to achieve today. This is the second day of debate on this Bill. Yesterday, we heard one of the most extraordinary statements ever uttered in this House, when the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) said"““£1.7 million does not buy an awful lot these days””—[Official Report, 19 April 2006; Vol. 445, c. 171.]" We have gone from the depths of that comment to the heights of the points made by the hon. Members for North Down and for Tewkesbury, and various others. The key question is: can a democracy flourish or even function if some of the people in the democratic process have pasts that might be bloody and bitter, and whose lives have been lived in opposition to the principle of democracy? It would be otiose for me to make the obvious point that, if the sort of filter or block that is proposed in the amendment had been imposed in the past, people such as George Washington, Jan Smuts, Menachem Begin and Nelson Mandela would never have held office. As it happens, all four held the highest office in their respective nations, and did so with distinction. Some may say that there is a difference between a declared war and the sort of activity that we are talking about. That would be true in the case of three of the people whom I mentioned, but in one case it would not.