It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley). The issues surrounding this Bill, I suppose, can be traced back to 1994—rather than to 1998, as many people allude to unrepentantly over and again—because that was when paramilitary groups decided, in various ways, to call it a day. Those who had inflicted pain, misery and mayhem on all of us in Northern Ireland said that the game was up and that terror was going to finish. Political negotiations then came about. Four years later, unfortunately, terror was then legitimised. Those were the unfortunate origins of where we are today. We might try to rehearse history or to rewrite it, as others have tried to do, but that is what happened.
We then had a period of diminishing violence. All of us tried to come to terms with what we hoped would be a much better future. I fully understand, accept and share the view that many have on the Conservative Benches: that the problem now is that IRA terrorists, by and large, are not pursued, but there are the soldiers and former police officers caught in very difficult circumstances who, in many instances, had a split second to decide whether their lives were at risk or to take action to try to preserve an innocent life by taking someone else’s—a split second to decide whether a person was a threat to themselves or to their colleagues. Therein lies the difficulty.
Again, I fully understand the views of Conservative Members, especially those who have served, who say that we have to try to draw a line under this, and that this Bill is a way of doing that. Several Conservative Members have alluded to, for example, the late Dennis Hutchings. His case would, I believe, have collapsed, as did those of Soldier F and several others. There are
different reasons for each case, but the underlying reason is that the passage of time has meant that even where the Public Prosecution Service thinks there is a possibility of a successful prosecution, it finds that for a variety of reasons it is not able to bring it to a successful conclusion, no matter how much it presses.
The passage of time has occurred and people’s memories are dimmed, and it is almost impossible to get an accurate recollection of what happened on a particular day. For example, I was on the city streets of Londonderry on the very day of Bloody Sunday. I have a reasonably clear recollection of what happened, even though I was a very young teenager at the time, but I could not give a second-by-second, minute-by-minute account of everything that happened on that day. I do remember that three days before two police officers had been gunned down with a machine gun. We will never know whether it was the same machine gun that the Saville inquiry said Martin McGuinness held on Bloody Sunday.
We come to the point now of assessing whether the Bill—even with some of the amendments that we hope, if passed, would make it a less bad Bill—will draw a line under what is happening. My view is that it is unlikely to do so. There are many people in Northern Ireland and a whole range of victims. Some have moved on, while some find it difficult to move on. Some have come to terms with the loss of loved ones, while others continue to grieve. What they all know is that even before this Bill is considered, there is very little likelihood of any successful prosecution.
The problem the Bill presents is that, if it is passed—even in slightly amended form—it slams shut the possibility of any potential prosecution or any justice ever being brought to bear on the cases involving loved ones. For that reason, my colleagues and I will be opposing the Bill.