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Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) Bill

My Lords, I want briefly to follow the noble Viscount on the question of language. In Northern Ireland today the main language is English. The second largest language is Chinese—Mandarin; it is not Irish. More people listed on the census speak Mandarin than speak Irish. The noble Viscount is quite right: minority languages in Northern Ireland should be taken into account. I totally support the spirit of the Bill. I look forward to the return of devolution at Stormont in Northern Ireland. The Bill is well intentioned. There are obviously many problems. I am quite concerned at the negative approach by many of those who took part in the debate in another place yesterday. The IRA is fundamental to a solution. Sinn Fein/IRA must accept and support the policing and court systems in Northern Ireland. It must be remembered—and this is the bad news—that the IRA has not gone away. Gerry Adams, no less, has confirmed that. Its full structure is still there. It may have decommissioned some of its armaments but the IRA is still there, and that is a worry for the majority British community in Northern Ireland. The Sinn Fein/IRA leadership has been with ETA. As the noble Baroness, Lady Park, said, it has been in Palestine in the past few weeks. Of course we know it was in Columbia. The International Monitoring Commission is not monitoring the IRA’s activities outside the island of Ireland. Will it investigate the presence of the IRA in the guise of NGOs in Iraq training terrorists how to let off bombs through mobile phones to attack the American forces?