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Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) Bill

I support Amendments Nos. 6 and 7 of the noble Lord, Lord Trimble. When speaking to Amendment No. 7, he brought to our attention an extraordinary state of affairs. The Committee should thank him most sincerely for having managed to winkle out what has been going on in Northern Ireland all these years. The fact that Ministers can only give a direction to permanent secretaries, and permanent secretaries have a power to do almost anything they want, is quite extraordinary. The Minister should look carefully at this situation and tell us how it can be sorted out. We would be enormously grateful to him were he to do so. Who takes the decisions in Northern Ireland needs to be made absolutely clear. I shall speak to Amendments No. 5 and the Question whether Clause 8 should stand part of the Bill, which are in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Clifton. Before doing so, I give notice that I intend to reserve my right to testthe opinion of the House on the Question whether Clause 8 should stand part of the Bill, but I will listen to the remarks of the Minister before I decide. Clause 8 removes the need for a cross-community vote of the Assembly to confirm the nominations of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister. Before the St Andrews talks began, it was proposed that this requirement would be replaced by a vote to confirm the whole of the Executive. We even received a draft clause from officials to put this in place. Our Amendment No. 5 would insert the relevant parts of that clause into this Bill. We have amended slightly the definition of cross-community consent, which we shall discuss later this evening, to ensure that the votes of all Members of the Assembly have equal weight. Even this proposal has now disappeared and no vote will be required to confirm any of the Ministers in their positions in the Executive. This is very bad for the effective government of Northern Ireland. Under the 1998 Act, the First Minister and Deputy First Minister are required to act jointly on a number of specific occasions. They should act jointly. This is surely the whole point of what we are trying to achieve in Northern Ireland; namely, a government where local politicians act together for the good of all the people of Northern Ireland. When the Assembly exercised devolved power in the few years in which it was operational before suspension, there was very little—in fact, no—collective responsibility in the Executive. Ministers acted individually; power-sharing was already weak under the Good Friday agreement. This was evidenced by the poor relationship between the UUP and the SDLP. While some minor improvements have been made, these are not sufficient to take into account the increased political polarisation and the ascendancy of the DUP and Sinn Fein. How do the Government expect this situation to improve when there is to be no indication that the Assembly confidently expects the Executive, including the First and Deputy First Ministers, to work together? The removal of the need for any vote, for either the joint election of First Minister and Deputy First Minister or for the Executive as a whole, is a major flaw. The need for government parties formally to recognise each other’s mandates and legitimacy in having a share of power and responsibility has been undermined. There is a danger that the only way in which the DUP or Sinn Fein could operate or coexist within the same government is through creating more and more separation. At present, the DUP and Sinn Fein do not appear to be talking to one another. It is a big leap to see them effectively running a regional government in partnership in four months, hopeful though we might be of it. Northern Ireland could end up with government by memorandum, with civil servants acting as messengers between various Ministers who are not prepared to talk to one another and are not required to do so by the system. Furthermore, the Government have missed an opportunity to bind all the parties into a firm commitment to build a shared future, in order to counter the tendencies towards separation. That is why I ask the Government either to remove Clause 8, which would allow us to revert to the original position of a cross-community vote to confirm the Firstand Deputy First Minister, or to accept Amendment No. 5, which would provide for the Executive as a whole to be confirmed by a cross-community vote.