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European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I hope I will be forgiven if I make a Third Reading speech on this amendment. I think that many of your Lordships have done so already. One of the most remarkable things I have heard in this afternoon’s debate came, to my surprise, from the sagacious lips of the noble Lord, Lord Owen—that we should do everything we could to help the Irish. It does not seem to me that the Irish need any help. It seems to me that they are doing very well on their own, thank you very much. The idea that they need help from us is really quite extraordinary. In my view, it is the rest of us who may need help. I come now to the next most extraordinary omission. We heard from a former head of the Foreign Office a list of the options that might confront us. It never occurred to him that one of the possibilities is that the Czechs might throw this out. Has it not reached the Foreign Office yet that the Czech constitutional court is sitting on this and that the President of the Czech Republic has said that it is dead? My noble friend Lord Anderson alluded to that, and I am much in debt to him for doing so.