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Policing (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Northern Ireland) Order 2007

I shall not detain the Committee long, but perhaps I can emphasise one point. Weeks before Op Ballast was made public, I talked about a leaking process. It was a leaking process through the press. Literally within 24 hours, the channels were able to run their programmes. Chris Muir on UTV had a programme on within 24 hours that had taken days or weeks to film, so there had been a break in confidentiality. One might have suspected that when one saw the SDLP leader in another place, Mark Durkan, jumping on the bandwagon and doing what any of us could have done. The identities of three senior police officers were fairly lightly disguised. I worked with them and know them. They were straightforward, decent people. As three individuals, they did more than any other three to bring peace to Northern Ireland. They were named in another place by the leader of the SDLP as though they were criminals. There is no piece of paper that can answer that. That is the reality and that is what we face. Quite bluntly, I do not want to appear to be controversial, but I have to put it in these terms. If we undermine the faith of the majority of people—by ““the majority of people”” I mean lots of people who have no political axe to grind, ordinary members of both traditions—or we undermine the integrity of the law and the processes of the law, we thrust Northern Ireland back into the arms of the unscrupulous.