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Northern Ireland Bill

The hon. Lady has put her finger on one of the aspects that I hope the House will probe in detail in the debates that we will have tomorrow. One of the points on which I will then seek clarification from the Minister of State is whether the enabling powers to which the hon. Lady has just referred will be carefully circumscribed by reference to the purposes of this particular Bill or whether they could, as she suggests, have a wider application than the House would wish to provide. I can understand why the Government have chosen the type of language that they have, but I am a little critical of their approach to the debate on the Bill. It is presented too much as if there were a neat symmetry between republicans and Unionists. The Secretary of State was right when he said at the beginning of his speech that what is stopping devolution happening is the brute fact that the majority of the Unionist community—and, for that matter, many nationalists—in Northern Ireland do not yet feel able to trust Sinn Fein and the IRA when they say that they have put terrorism permanently behind them. I would have greater sympathy with the Secretary of State’s later argument—that the different political parties in Northern Ireland should, in effect, shape up, come together and reach an agreement—if that involved only the sort of sincere yet profound differences that exist between his party and mine, for example, or between the Unionist parties and the SDLP. Such differences come down to questions about how policy should be decided in an agreed constitutional, democratic and peaceful context. However, the reality is different: the unionist community is being asked to engage with, trust and go into government alongside members of a political movement that for decades has been dedicated to the destruction of the political entity that is Northern Ireland. Moreover, that movement has tried to change the constitutional status through violence and, at times, acts of indiscriminate slaughter rather than through the ballot box. We are being asked to make that leap of faith at a time when the republican movement is still led by men who in the past have authorised or taken part in acts of violence that have caused grievous loss of life and injury among people from all communities and on both sides of the water. The process of coming to terms with engaging with members of Sinn Fein has been difficult enough for my party, as we have lost friends and colleagues to terrorism. Some of my colleagues in the House of Lords and elsewhere in the Conservative party will bear the physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives. Others of my friends, including a fair number of current Members of this House, have had to live for months or years with the knowledge that they and perhaps their families were on an IRA list, and with the expectation that they could be threatened or attacked at any time. I can recall conversations with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) and with Lord Mawhinney in which they described how peculiar it was for them, as Ministers in the Northern Ireland Office, to sit down to negotiate with men who they knew for certain had been plotting their murder only a few months previously. I am not making a special plea on behalf of my party but, if members of the Conservative party have reason to be wary and cautious, that must be doubly and trebly the case for members of the Unionist parties. All hon. Members, irrespective of party allegiance, must understand how much we ask of our Unionist colleagues when we argue that a political agreement has to include Sinn Fein.