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Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) Bill

We shall have to see what happens on Friday regarding any nomination process that takes place. It seems to me that the Democratic Unionist party is accepting its responsibilities as the largest political party in Northern Ireland and is seeking a way for devolution to be restored. It deserves credit for the moves that it has made, and I now want to see Sinn Fein live up to its frequent claim to have put the past behind it and to be a normal democratic political organisation. I understand the differences and the old battles between the established democratic political parties in Northern Ireland, but I really believe that everyone’s attention now needs to be focused on the need for the republicans to deliver on policing and on support for the criminal justice system. That is the essential ingredient of the enduring settlement that is still missing. We are hoping to go into the Bill in greater detail during its subsequent stages this evening, and to raise various questions with the Minister. I want to highlight four areas of concern that I hope the Minister of State will be able to deal with in his response to this debate. If he cannot do so, perhaps he will be able to respond to them during subsequent proceedings. The first concern relates to the accountability of Ministers in part 2 of the Bill. It is important that the Government should set out clearly how that is to work. It would appear from what the different Northern Ireland parties have said and from some of the press comment on the matter that there are contradictory claims about the extent to which an individual Minister will have autonomy and to which he or she will be subject to the collective will of the Executive. When it comes to matters such as sorting out the details of education—for instance, criteria for admission to post-primary schools—an answer to that question will be very important. Secondly, I want the Government to spell out more fully what will happen if devolution is restored—if the deadline of 25 March is met—but the Provisional IRA then returns to crime. We do not want that to happen, but after the Northern bank robbery we must accept that it is a matter of more than just academic speculation. I do not think that in those circumstances it would be right for every other party to be penalised. Thirdly, clause 9 and schedule 6 provide for the establishment of a department for policing and justice. I have no quarrel with that, but I hope the Government will assure us that it would be accompanied by a reduction in the number of other departments at Stormont. I do not think that we need yet another hierarchy of officials and team of Ministers to add to the large number that Northern Ireland would already have under devolution. I also hope that the Government will look afresh at the possibility of district policing partnerships sub-groups outside Belfast. It seems to me that in limiting the number of DPPs to the number of councils, we risk making DPPs remote from local communities. We are approaching a time when there will be just seven local authorities in Northern Ireland, and those outside Belfast will cover very large areas of land and very diverse populations. Might not having just one DPP to cover the whole of such a local authority area remove effective neighbourhood participation in policing? Fourthly, I want to question the Government on their time scale for moving towards what I would term normal politics. I accept that in the circumstances of Northern Ireland the system of designating Assembly Members Unionist or nationalist, and the complex rules for cross-community voting, are necessary; but I hope that that will not always be the case. When I have talked to politicians in Northern Ireland, I have met members of both the Democratic Unionist party and the Ulster Unionist party whose views on questions of economic policy and general political philosophy would be pretty close to mine, and others whose outlook would be much closer to that of the Secretary of State and the Labour party. I expect the Secretary of State has found the same. At the risk of horrifying the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), I will add that I have met members of the SDLP whom in England I would welcome to the Conservative party, and who I think would feel very much at home there. I hope, however, that in a stable, devolved settlement in Northern Ireland, politics will be about health, jobs, schools and the environment, and no longer about deadlines, the operation of committees and the internal rules of devolved institutions. Do we really have to wait until 2015 for any review of the current arrangements, as clause 11 envisages? Should it not be possible to bring the date forward if devolution is clearly settled, enduring and working well?