Northern Ireland Arms Decommissioning Act 1997 (Amnesty Period) Order 2008

To follow what the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, has said about the people on the loyalist side who still have weapons, we should think about how we are dealing with this, because we have dealt with widespread terrorism through the measures that we have had. Right now, we do not have that terrorism. On the republican side, we are dealing with dissidents. On the loyalist side, we are dealing with a group of leaders who we believe would like to come out of terrorism, but there are enough dissidents and active people to restrain them from doing so. I am not sure that the measures we are taking and the way in which we are approaching dissidents is quite right, because if the loyalists live in fear of their ranks, which are still dissident enough to put the fear into them, they will look at republicans and say, ““What have the republicans done? They have disarmed. They have done all that””. But they have got dissidents and we have not found a way of resolving the problem of those dissidents. Should the loyalists go down the same route, they can see that we still have not found a way to help such a leadership resolve the problem. Things are so well advanced in Northern Ireland compared with the way they were that I by no means criticise the Government for not having the right answer or an answer to it. But there must be something in the fact that we have not found a way of dealing with the dissidents on the republican side, who I realise are a very small problem compared with those on the loyalist side, and either bringing them in or punishing them well enough to stop them, and they are still active. In an extreme way, I believe that there is a way to resolve this, but I realise that our current politicians will not take that way. For instance, if one takes the republican side, the politicians, who know who the dissidents are because they were on their books years ago, could quite easily say, ““Okay, listen boys, we will not bother you for three months, but you must stop in three months. We support the police. We support law and order and we support the constitution””—we hope—““and, if you do not give up, we will do something about it””. I do not believe that we are giving them enough support to enable them to do that, even if that is a consideration. I definitely do not think that the loyalists have a clue about how to bring in their grass roots. It is a social problem and an employment issue. As someone said, it has become their lifestyle. Are we really doing enough to bring those groups with us? This is part-punishment, part-carrot. Perhaps the carrot is not good enough. We do not have quite the right approach to this, because we have suppressed the terrorism but we do not have a dissident policy.