Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, I apologise for intervening on Report. I should like to make two points in support of the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran. I have three nephews and a niece, whom we moved out during the Troubles. They were moved to Wales to live in an area where they could perhaps live a half-decent life. They come home—I repeat, home—once a month to Northern Ireland. I fear this provision being in the Bill. No one in Northern Ireland objects to being asked for identification. Sometimes even when we book plane tickets we are asked to identify ourselves. But to have in the Bill a provision that a person may or may not have to identify himself when coming back into what he considers to be his homeland is hard to take. The noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, is right. If this is passed, the perception in Northern Ireland will be, ““There you are, there’s another cutting off of us””. A number of Peers today have spoken about our huge sporting interest. I have dozens of friends who travel regularly to Scotland for football or rugby matches, or over to England to watch Manchester United and so forth. It is wrong to suddenly say, ““Right, if you live in Northern Ireland and you go across the water, when you come back you will have to identify yourself and go through passport control””. We have had years of identifying ourselves in Northern Ireland. That is not the problem. The problem is that in Northern Ireland the perception will be that this is another nail in the coffin of Northern Ireland being part of the United Kingdom. When I fill in a census form or travel to the United States, I put down that I am British and that the United Kingdom is my country. Please do not take that away from us.