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Billy Wright Inquiry

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for his opening comments. He asked a number of questions. First, on the lessons for prisons, he played a huge part in ensuring that prisons were devolved. It is not for me to make judgments today about the comments in the tribunal's report. I have a meeting with the devolved Minister, David Ford, on Monday, and I will go through those recommendations with him. The same applies to the right hon. Gentleman's questions about Maghaberry. There are 70 separated prisoners in Maghaberry at the moment, which is an enormous contrast with the concentration of 500 prisoners in the Maze in 1997. Again, however, if there are lessons to be drawn from today's report, they are to be drawn by the devolved Minister and those who work under him, and then put into practice. On collusion, the right hon. Gentleman quite rightly pointed out that there is a contrast between Judge Cory's definition, which ran to 765 words, and the shorter version, which Lord MacLean came up with. For the benefit of the House, let me read the concise definition of collusion that Lord MacLean came up with in the report:"““For our part we consider that the essence of collusion is an agreement or arrangement between individuals or organisations, including government departments, to achieve an unlawful or improper purpose. The purpose may also be fraudulent or underhand””." That is a good distillation of what Judge Cory was aiming at. We have to take the definition given by the tribunal in the report, and the report was quite clear: there was no collusion in this case. The right hon. Gentleman asked about the Finucane case. As with the last time he raised the issue, I have written to the Finucane family. He wrestled with the problem when he was in office, and although I am fully aware of the difficulties and sensitivities associated with the case, it is right that I talk to the family first, before deciding how we proceed further. The right hon. Gentleman then talked about the past. He quite rightly contrasted the £30 million spent on the one death that we are discussing today and the £34 million that was the original budget, over six years, for the HET, which is looking into 3,268 deaths. My view is that this asymmetrical approach to the past, with an extraordinary intensity of effort put into a small number of cases, is not fair and is invidious. I hope that we will get the same reaction today that we had to Saville—that it was an effort well spent—but for the future, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, there is no consensus on how we handle the past. The right hon. Gentleman called for submissions reacting to the Eames-Bradley report, which he received in October and which, in fairness to us, we published in the summer. I am listening to parties in this House across the board, and the Minister of State and I are going round Northern Ireland talking to numerous people and groups. Sadly, however, as he saw from those replies to Eames-Bradley, there is just no consensus. It is not for us, as the Westminster Government, to impose one; rather, it is our task to try to find a way forward in close collaboration with local politicians and local groups. That is how we intend to approach the past.