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Intelligence and Security Committee

I speak in this debate every year, and it is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wirral, South (Ben Chapman). This is the first time that I have risen to speak as chairman of the counter-terrorism sub-committee. On that note, I thank the Home Secretary and draw attention to the outstanding work of a little-known organisation, which has, in fairness, been mentioned today—that is, the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism. The sub-committee has recently been to visit it and we were all hugely impressed. Mr. Charles Farr, who is at the head of the office, deserves to be hugely congratulated on the work that he is doing. The other thing that interests me, and I am surprised that it has not been mentioned, is that over the past few months, active terrorism inside this country has, of course, come not from the Islamist fundamentalists on whom most of us have concentrated—indeed I shall concentrate on them—but from the hands of republican terrorists in Northern Ireland. Anybody who has doubted the time, effort and resources that the security services have put into countering that threat has only to look at the series of successful arrests that followed the horrid murders outside Massereene barracks and elsewhere in Northern Ireland over the last few weeks. The arrests were a huge feather in the cap of the Security Service and the Police Service of Northern Ireland.