Northern Ireland Bill (Allocation of Time)

Yet again, we have a Second Reading debate on a Bill that addresses the devolution of justice and policing in Northern Ireland. It comes, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Down (Mr. McGrady) noted earlier, on top of a torrent of legislation on the same subject—seven previous Acts have touched to some degree on this issue. The reason for having so much legislation is that there has been so much misrepresentation about what the devolution of justice actually means. We have also had a lot of pretence about its imminence in the past, and perhaps there will be more pretence about it now. Let us reflect on how this issue has developed over recent years. Sinn Fein used it as an excuse to put off the evil day, as they saw it, when they would have to sign up to policing. They said that they had to have devolution of justice and policing first, so the terms, principles and constructs of the devolution of justice and policing became the be-all and end-all before Sinn Fein could move forward on policing. It was essential to Sinn Fein, because they could say that when they went on the Policing Board, they would have control over the police. The Government—indeed the two Governments—started playing that line and brought us through a chicane of different legislative models and pieces of legislation in order to create landmarks, which were optical illusions to show that significant progress was being made on the road to the devolution of justice and policing. Those optics could then be served up to supporters and the broader public. All that created fear and unease within the Unionist community, so parties such as the Democratic Unionist party worked to hold up the devolution of justice and policing with dire warnings about paramilitary control or people with paramilitary records gaining control of the police and the prosecution service, thus creating a lot of unnecessary and undue fears about what the devolution of justice and policing would entail. What we need to remember about all this—in fairness, the Secretary of State has made this point in the past, as did his predecessor—is that a significant number of the powers previously exercised by Secretaries of State and the Northern Ireland Office had already been devolved both to the Policing Board and the Chief Constable, and rightly so. Broadly, that worked well and confounded the low expectations of many people. We also need to remember that when the devolution of policing and justice comes, whoever or whatever the relevant Minister may be, they will not be in a position to lift the phone and tell the Chief Constable, "Set my people free; go after those people." Ministers will not be able to interfere in prosecutions, judicial considerations or anything else of that nature. Many of the fears have thus been hyped up—apprehensions on the one hand and perhaps false aspirations and ambitions on the other. Any such falsehoods needed to be laid to rest. With the devolution of justice and policing, there will be no going back to the political control of the old Ministry of Home Affairs in Northern Ireland, and there will be no going forward to paramilitary control. Why? Because the protections in the Patten report and the criminal justice review—two reviews set up under the Good Friday agreement—are there to stop it. Sinn Fein knows that, which is why it ended up having to sign up to policing, despite the fact that it had neither the devolution of justice and policing nor even a date for it to happen. At the time, it did not even have the agreement that it now says that it has with the DUP. Its position was indulged for far too long, with all the phoney legislation and other moves of Governments emerging from it. That is why we are back here dealing with the issue yet again today. The DUP, of course, knows all about this, too. That is why the current DUP leader, the right hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson) told The Irish Times four and a half years ago that the devolution of justice was "no big move" for Unionists, yet we get it played again and again as though it were the biggest possible move for Unionists. Again, bad management of the process by the Government has allowed the Democratic Unionist party to move from one tactic to another. The fact is that devolution of justice and policing will be a threat to nobody and an opportunity for everyone. It will consummate political change and policing change. It will ensure that we complete the suite of devolution in having policing and justice powers alongside all others. It will mean that MLAs will be worthy of the title Members of the Legislative Assembly, because they will be able to legislate on the criminal law alongside other matters and ensure that programmes, policies and budgets across all the services that policing has to deal with, along with other devolved services, can better mesh and engage.