It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson). It is not often that the Alliance party and the DUP find agreement in this Chamber, particularly in the current context, but there was certainly a lot I would concur with in his remarks. I would also concur with a lot of the interventions from the hon. Member for Foyle (Colum Eastwood). There is an important lesson in that, which is that, despite everything else that is happening in Northern Ireland, there is at least a degree of unity across the Northern Ireland political parties in expressing significant concerns about this legislation.
Before getting to the other points I want to make, I want to start on a more positive note. The shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle), mentioned Paul Gallagher, who was shot and partially paralysed in a loyalist gun attack in 1994. I want to put on record our congratulations to Paul Gallagher on achieving his PhD at a ceremony at the weekend, not least because his research involves legacy. He has been both living it and researching it for almost 30 years.
The first point I want to make is about the word “reconciliation”, which appears in the long title of the Bill and is referenced throughout it. Reconciliation is very much in the DNA of the Alliance party; it is what we are fundamentally about. That said, we are concerned about the way in which the term “reconciliation” has been used in the Bill. Reconciliation was a core principle of the Stormont House agreement, and the implementation and reconciliation group was set up as a separate structure that was envisaged under Stormont House. Reconciliation was taken seriously in that process.
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I think we have a problem if we are saying on a top-down basis that families should be reconciled and that this is the process by which they will be reconciled. That is a determination for them to make; they have to live the experience and feel the reconciliation and engage with it. There is no one single definition of what that reconciliation will mean. It might evolve organically in different ways, but there is a danger in our automatically assuming that because this Bill is about reconciliation, it will achieve it.
The Minister of State referred to the fact that some people—I do not know if he was referring to me, the hon. Member for Foyle or anyone else—were saying that it was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy that families
would not agree to engage with the process, and that we should be showing leadership in that regard. Let me be clear: as elected representatives from Northern Ireland, all we are doing is reflecting what we are hearing on the ground directly from those families. This is not something we are recommending to people directly; it is what they are saying to us. They are deeply concerned about the nature of the process itself.