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Northern Ireland

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness for not being here on time. That was due to a transport delay. Having worked shoulder to shoulder with the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, in 1998, I am hugely disappointed to see this arrangement—it is certainly not an agreement—impacting on the future of Northern Ireland and to find that, again and again, the St. Andrews arrangement has been used to divert and distort what we worked very hard to achieve in 1998. There is the idea that somehow we can cut a Minister of Justice out of the hedge, rather than use the processes that were agreed in 1998; there is the idea that the leader of the SDLP and the leader of my party can somehow be instructed to chair a working group without ever having been involved, at any stage, in the Hillsborough talks—not even having seen a piece of paper with a proposal on it. There is the fact that the piece of paper that we talk about today is totally anonymous—it does not have a signature or a name. This is not an agreement—it is an insult to the people of Northern Ireland and I feel it is an insult to Members of this House to have it sold as an agreement. Nothing is a greater insult to this House. Does the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland know something we do not know about the processes that were put in place to examine certain allegations against the First Minister that were carried on a BBC programme? This effusive response by the Secretary of State is not acceptable.