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Northern Ireland Bill

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr. Anderson), who serves on the Select Committee and has a real and deep affection for Northern Ireland, which is obvious whenever one travels there with him. I am also glad to be the first Opposition Member to speak after the right hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley), who made a highly significant speech, as people will realise when they read it in Hansard tomorrow. He and his deputy, the hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson), have both contributed significantly during this month. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington), who spoke eloquently from the Front Bench, referred to the two speeches made by the hon. Member for Belfast, East, one in the United States on 6 April and the other at the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body on Monday. The substance of the speeches of both the leader and the deputy leader of the DUP was that, for all the difficulties that they face in doing so, they are prepared to sit down with and serve with those of very different political persuasions so long as those people play by the democratic rules and make it abundantly clear that that is what they are doing. I, like the right hon. Member for North Antrim and my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury, support the Bill. I wish the Government well over the next few months. I hope that the negotiations will succeed. I am worried about deadlines—I realise that they must be there, but I would rather have the end of the year than 24 November. People in the rest of the United Kingdom do not fully face up to the difficulties that there will be and the daily burden of those who practise democratic politics in Northern Ireland if there is to be a restored Assembly. Those daily burdens have been referred to obliquely in this debate in many ways. First, as I said in Question Time today—and the Secretary of State agreed—it is inconceivable that anybody who is engaged directly or indirectly in criminality should be involved in the government of any part of the United Kingdom, whether this House, a district or parish council or a devolved Parliament or Assembly. It is absolutely crucial that those who say that they have renounced the bullet for the ballot box prove that in every possible way. Like the Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury and the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy), who spoke splendidly earlier, I greatly welcome today’s IMC report and what it says. However, we must not make the mistake, because we are encouraged by the good bits, of neglecting the others. There is a clear indication in that report that leading figures on the undemocratic republican side, while they might have renounced terrorism and engaged in a massive act of decommissioning—the latter I accept, and the former I hope that I can accept—are still benefiting from the ill-gotten gains of some pretty horrendous crimes and are still involved in those crimes. It would be wrong for me, as Chairman of the Select Committee, to pre-empt a report that has not yet been drafted, let alone published, but there are several members of the Committee in the Chamber who have listened with me to evidence that we have received from a variety of people and organisations. Some has been heard in public and some in camera because of its sensitivity. We have been told clearly that there are those who have been involved with IRA-Sinn Fein who are deeply implicated in acts of criminality, who have been so implicated in the recent past and almost certainly are at present. There must be an absolute renunciation. When I intervened on my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington) to say that the best thing that Sinn Fein could do would be to disband the IRA, I meant what I said. That would send those who want Northern Ireland to have a proper democratic future a real signal that Sinn Fein was indeed seeking to turn its back on the past. We cannot make hatred history—which is what we must do in Northern Ireland—we cannot engender trust, and we cannot properly embrace the doctrine of forgiveness in which the right hon. Member for North Antrim made clear that he truly believes unless there is a proper understanding that those who wish to sit down with the Social Democratic and Labour party, the Democratic Unionist party and the Ulster Unionist party are putting themselves in a context of what I would call democratic equality. Even when that happens, there will still be real difficulties in making the Assembly work. The right hon. Member for Torfaen touched on them, amusingly, when he said that he would find it difficult to enter into a coalition with Tories or Liberal Democrats. I would find it difficult to enter into a political coalition with friends—of whom I have many—on the other side of the House, not because I do not trust them and not because I would for a moment impugn their democratic credentials, but because we have very different political beliefs. Yet we in the rest of the United Kingdom are asking the democratic parties in Northern Ireland to sit down with Sinn Fein, whose political beliefs—as I said earlier—are inimical to those of most of us in the Chamber, wherever we come from. Sinn Fein’s economic and education policies are closer to those of Cuba than to those of the United Kingdom.