It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson), particularly as at least an element of my speech would have exhibited a degree of naivety without his. I will continue with it, but I think I should apologise for it in advance. The purpose of the first part of my speech was to juxtapose my experience of terrorism in this country with what was happening with regard to the IRA and its activities in this country. Part of my premise is that, after the Good Friday agreement we are in a position where any occurrences that happen in Northern Ireland make the news in a considerably lower-level format than they would have done during my time growing up. So it is almost easy to believe, viewing Northern Ireland from a distance, that all is well over there, peace has broken out and the world is a good place, whereas, the incident mentioned at the start of the hon. Gentleman’s speech clearly proves that that is not the case.
I was drawn towards making this comparison because it is my 50th birthday this year, the troubles started in 1968 and I wanted to talk about my experience of how
they had an impact on us in this country over that time. I am not old enough to remember this, but in 1972 we might have had the first cynical ceasefire that the IRA announced over the Christmas period, and yet only a short time later we had the bombings in Birmingham.
I fully appreciate that nobody has been convicted of those bombings in Birmingham, so it is not possible for us to say so with a degree of certainty or to attribute the cause to it, but I would say that we are fairly comfortable in knowing that the IRA was responsible, and many people lost their lives at that time.