Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (Northern Ireland Political Parties) Order 2007

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction of this order, and I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Bew. He was a colleague of mine as part of the wider Northern Ireland academic community, even if he worked for the other university. This situation is in a class of intractable problems, rather like the West Lothian question, and it will be with us for the foreseeable future. There are some unsatisfactory features, which all sides recognise, in these exemptions applying to Northern Ireland. There is a way we can contrive to deal with it. The Northern Ireland Assembly should have an upper Chamber, suitably adapted from the Celtic House of Druids, and people could buy their appointment to it by donating to the nearest parties and joining the legislature. We are trying to avoid that sort of thing here but we could nevertheless pass that on as a transitional experiment, which I commend. Only slightly more seriously, this continuing exemption is offensive for many of the reasons raised by the noble Lords, Lord Bew and Lord Glentoran. I have one question for the Minister. Article 3 of the order refers to someone being eligible to obtain an Irish passport, or certificates of nationality or naturalisation. That is a very loose, weasel phrase. Anyone can say, ““I’m sure I am eligible to obtain one of these things””. This loose wording is most unsatisfactory. Will the Minister kindly explain how that will be tightly defined rather than being an open-ended mere gesture? Otherwise, with reluctance, we on these Benches accept, given the exigencies of Northern Ireland, that this exemption should be allowed. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, that I do not want these provisions to be set in concrete. We should review them in four or five years’ time to see how things are working because we hope that by then, Northern Ireland democracy will have matured enough not to need these loopholes. Very reluctantly, we support the order.