Terrorism (Northern Ireland) Bill

My Lords, the Minister’s speech has already dealt with many of my concerns, but I shall nevertheless reiterate them. My chief concern with the Bill is to support the provisions which retain and strengthen the powers of the police and the status of the judicial system. I believe that the Diplock courts need to be retained, and those parts of Section 67 which provide that, because of the vulnerability of magistrates’ courts, a magistrate cannot grant bail. Further, we should retain police powers for the prevention and investigation of terrorist crime; notably, the powers to arrest, stop, search and seize, and to examine documents. The Bill before us does that, and even extends such provision. As Gerry Adams famously said, the IRA has not yet gone away, despite some tardy decommissioning. The paramilitaries remain a serious threat to society. It is fashionable to accept Sinn Fein/IRA’s dissociation of itself from the Real IRA, INLA and the Continuity IRA. However, these so-called dissident groups would never be allowed to exist and continue to recruit and train even now, according to the Monitoring Commission, if they were really defiant, independent entities out of PIRA’s control. They are, for the Provisional IRA, useful organs which can be disowned, as they were at Omagh, but are, in reality, still manifestations, and even creatures, of the IRA. For the same reason, I am glad to see, if I have understood the Bill, that the oral evidence of a police officer will continue to be admissible as evidence that the accused was or is a member of a proscribed organisation. I could wish that there were not the prospect that some Part VII provisions, though continuing in force after February next year, are to cease to have effect in July 2007, but the Minister has commented on that. It has taken eight years for the IRA to do some serious—although, in my view, almost certainly incomplete—decommissioning. HMG, for its part, has demolished border posts, disbanded regiments and removed protection from police posts. The paramilitaries, however, are still there, dominating their communities. Those they exiled have not returned. They are not only, despite the good work of the Organised Crime Task Force, a serious threat to the economy of the country—and not just through the Northern Bank raid—but continue to prevent justice from being done, and try to exert undue influence through the so-called restorative justice networks. They have driven the McCartney sisters, good republicans, from their homes, and continue to deny them justice. The case of the McCartney murder has still not come to court, because the IRA refuses, as always, to allow witnesses to testify; another example of its total, continuing rejection of the justice system. As at Omagh, it does not recognise the British courts. I hope that HMG continues to maintain, for as long as possible, a criminal justice system which can deliver justice. That will certainly be at risk if criminal justice in Northern Ireland is devolved too soon. Not least, we must not allow recent developments, which are by no means what they seem, to be exploited by Sinn Fein/IRA to bounce HMG into giving more concessions prematurely in the area of policing and criminal justice that are at present, I thank God, safe and in the public interest.