I will make a couple of brief remarks. I think the whole Committee wholeheartedly supports any effort to tackle paramilitarism. I think we would all agree that anyone who engages in or supports paramilitarism has no place in a democratic assembly, making and enforcing laws. I absolutely agree that all the sentiments in the oaths make sense.
Where I get a little concerned is when we start talking about investigating and sanctioning breaches. We must be careful about exactly what some of these words could involve. What we have in these undertakings are not entirely pledges not to do things. They are pledges to do things, so we get phrases such as,
“to challenge all paramilitary activity and associated criminality”.
I could be accused of breaching that undertaking because I have not sufficiently challenged something. What does challenge mean? Does it mean that I should verbally dispute the validity of something? Should I say that paramilitary activity is heinous and I have therefore met that pledge, or should I be out on the streets of Belfast, physically challenging that activity where I see it?
Equally, MLAs will undertake,
“to challenge paramilitary attempts to control communities”
and
“to work collectively with other members of the Assembly”.
I am not sure how we can have a sensible situation where someone is investigated because they have not quite worked collectively enough with other Members on something. Would that happen because they had been working independently, not collectively, and therefore that would not count, or because they had been working a bit collectively but not collectively enough? I am not sure how we go from an oath that sets out undertakings and beliefs to something that we could try to investigate and enforce.
The Oath we take in this place is to be loyal to Her Majesty the Queen and her successors, but I do not think that Members get taken to the standards board
because we have not quite been loyal enough to the Queen, or because something we have said has not been entirely consistent with the Oath. There is a separate code of conduct that we have to follow where the investigation of standards applies. We would not try to follow that from an oath. I am just not sure how the Members proposing the amendments could make the investigations and sanctions link to positive activities.