My Lords, like other noble Lords I am grateful to the Minister not just for presenting the Bill with his usual clarity this evening but also for all the work and engagement in the weeks preceding the Bill. I welcome, as others have done, the fact that that work will continue with the briefing on legacy issues tomorrow, which I hope to attend, like many other noble Lords here this evening.
This piece of legislation is of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has said, hardly one that has come to us too quickly, despite the fact that it is in technical terms fast-tracked. But of course it needed to be fast-tracked if it was to be through Parliament here in time for those important elements that refer to the Assembly to be implemented in advance of the Assembly election and the new Executive—and there is the fact that some more time will be given for the construction of the programme for government and the appointment of Ministers, and the pledges of office of Ministers and MLAs.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Empey, I have some scepticism about the value and strength of these pledges of office. As he said, we have had some experience of these kinds of things over a long period. However, in respect of the pledge of office and of other elements of this Bill which refer to the disbandment of paramilitary organisation, the fact that these things are included in the context of an agreement by the Northern Ireland parties at the most senior level is very positive. I was interested to learn that the term “disbandment” was brought forward not by the British and Irish Governments but by the Northern Ireland parties as part of their commitment. That degree of determination in terms of the expression of the language was an encouragement to me.
Indeed, in terms of the achievement of an agreement itself—to some extent brokered and encouraged by the Secretary of State, to whom we rightly pay tribute—there is perhaps a sense in which this agreement was more truly the product of the engagement of the political parties, particularly the two largest parties in Northern Ireland, than most other agreements. That is a very positive thing. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, also referred to the fact that budgets—not just welfare, but
beyond that—had not really been properly attended to. He suggested that it was to do with inefficiency. Perhaps so, but I am not entirely sure that that was the driver. I think that in truth the Northern Ireland parties, perhaps particularly Sinn Fein and maybe the SDLP, had come to the position over many years where they expected that in the end the British Government would pay and that if the political pressure was sufficient, a small amount of money—in Treasury terms—was likely to be forthcoming. Given that that has been the history, I do not think that we should be surprised that things were taken right to the limit and a little bit beyond because we have been on that track so often before. If you are going to change that, you need to accept that it will come to the limit and people will stare into the abyss. That is the key point. At that point, the political parties in Northern Ireland and their leaders stared into the abyss and decided that they would draw back and sign up for provisions that, were they held to, would obviate that kind of circumstance in the future. It does not matter what we put in the legislation, if people come to the point where they are prepared to have the whole thing fall to pieces, they will just ride roughshod over it, but if they are prepared to put it into legislation, it is at least some indication of willingness to work together to a good outcome, and I welcome that and the other various provisions.
Then we come to the disbanding of paramilitary organisations, which is not quite so incredibly urgent in terms of the election but is at the heart of the Bill. I declare an interest, which noble Lords know, as one of the three people commissioned by the First Minister and Deputy First Minister to produce a strategy for the disbanding of paramilitary groups. That is the title of the mandate. We have to be careful when we sign up for things. Some things have been said about victims. There are complaints that their interests were not satisfactorily dealt with. We have to accept that the references to victims in the Belfast agreement were very modest. I am not long back from doing some work in Colombia on the peace process there. The first thing they did in Colombia, before even reaching an agreement—in fact they have not yet reached an agreement with FARC—was to put in place legislation specifically to address the needs of victims. They started with the victims. They did not wait until after everything else to address victims. Should we ever have to do things again, we would have to advise that that is a better way of addressing things. We have to bear some responsibility for the fact that that was not the route that we took. One can always learn from the experience of others in other places.
I was also there partly to look at the so-called DDR provisions, the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration arrangements that they are looking at for FARC and in fact, in the last week or so, for the ELN. Again, we see something that may not have been a mistake on our part but was not the best way that one could have done things. If you are looking for disbandment or demobilisation, what does it mean? It means you are encouraging all the individuals who were involved in terrorist and paramilitary organisations to disperse—not to continue to be engaged with each other, other than in normal networks of friendships. That is not what was done. Instead, the paramilitary organisations
themselves were engaged with, as organisations. In that sense, the leaders of those organisations were enabled to have continuing patronage when it came to dealing with, for example, ex-prisoners’ groups. There are not just loyalist ex-prisoners’ groups and republican ex-prisoners’ groups; there are UVF and UDA ex-prisoners’ groups. Even the loyalists do not come together. Why? It is not just because of their history and background; it is because those leaders—of the past or whatever—have a degree of power and patronage within their organisation. We need to think quite a lot about the meaning of that, and about the responsibility we all have to take for the fact that we went down that road. It may be understandable that we did, but maybe in retrospect there were other ways to do it.
What does disbandment mean? There are some paramilitary organisations or—who knows?—former paramilitary organisations that say, “We’ve already gone away”. Whether people believe them or not is another matter. There are other paramilitary organisations that manifestly have not gone away but say that they would like to. In fact, every year they say they would like to, and even sometimes give a date when they will, although it does not actually happen. There are yet others that clearly have not the slightest intention of going away and in fact want to continue, grow and cause us all trouble and difficulty.
We have had reference, quite properly and soberly, to the recent death of the prison officer Adrian Ismay—a horrible reminder of the risks that prison officers and other members of the security services run in the course of their work. However, we also need to get it into perspective. We have probably fewer than 50 prisoners in Northern Ireland prisons in the separated regimes, out of 800 or so prisoners. That is a very small minority—vocal and troublesome, yes, but in comparison with the numbers we were dealing with in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, it is a totally different situation. We need to think about it, deal with it and treat it in a different way, perhaps without some of the anxieties about what could be done, internally in the prisons and externally in society, by addressing these kinds of issues.
As noble Lords will understand, those are some of the issues that are very much to the fore in my own mind when it comes to dealing with these matters. Noble Lords have referred to the fact that south of the border, too, there have recently been some horrifying events, but we have to ask ourselves seriously: at what point do we stop thinking about these things as paramilitary and start to identify them as organised crime—or, in some cases, disorganised crime? That is what it is: criminal activity. It has no serious political motivation at all. Other noble Lords have rightly referred to the fact that, just as this Assembly election will to some extent see a generational change in many leaders, there is also a generational change in some of these organisations too, with young people coming in who do not even remember the situation. There was an extremely interesting comment a couple of days ago by the Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness in response to claims by some people in the dissident republican movement that it was about remembering and implementing the wishes of the men of 1916. Martin McGuinness said—I paraphrase, but I think
this gives an accurate impression—“I didn’t get involved in the things I got involved in during the 1960s because of the men of 1916. I got involved because of what I saw happening in the 1960s to my community, and that is not what is happening now. The excuse of 1916, or even of the 1960s, does not stand in the here and now”. I thought that was an extremely interesting, powerful and in some ways rather courageous thing to say on the centenary of 1916. It says to us that those who are involved and engaged do not have a mandate from some of the most senior people in the republican movement for any political dimension to the use of criminal activity and threat of violence. It was an extremely powerful statement that we should build upon.
I welcome a number of the provisions in respect of the Independent Reporting Commission: for example, that it has a degree of diplomatic immunity and that it cannot be taken to court. Representatives of Her Majesty’s Government will recall that they were taken to court—in London, interestingly—by Sinn Fein in respect of the Independent Monitoring Commission, on which I served. It is clear that the IRC will not be susceptible to that—in truth, it was largely clear back then—and there is now a degree of protection. Indeed, subsequent to the whole Boston College issue, the records will be sacrosanct, and that is extremely important if people are to be open and honest.
However, we need to be a little bit careful: this is not a rerun of the IMC. The reporting commission will be looking at the report that my colleagues and I hope to have finished by the end of May and to publish and present the following month, and it will oversee the implementation of that strategy. That is very different from looking at all the activities of organisations. The reporting will take place once a year, not twice, as was the case with the IMC and was supposed to continue to be the case for the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. That is a different dynamic and a different situation, and there needs to be different expectations of what is possible.
The commission also needs to look at how we can change things for those who have been involved so that neither they nor their families feel bound to these organisations. Maybe there are things that we do in officialdom that make it difficult for people to give that up, leave it behind and get on with an ordinary civilian life. I have seen situations where not only the people involved but their children and grandchildren continue to suffer for things that happened some years ago. That is not helpful when we hope that these organisations will go away. We accept that organised crime will not go away, but it is hoped that paramilitary activity can begin to become a thing of the past.
There is much more that one could say, but which at this time of the evening it would not be sensible to say, and in any case there will be other opportunities to say it. However, it is important to point out, and to recognise, that the Bill represents something positive coming out of Northern Ireland and out of the engagement of political leaders. The Government are to be commended on bringing forward this legislation and on not waiting for an omnibus piece of legislation to deal with all the other issues of legacy and so on,
thereby delaying getting into place those things we can now put in place relatively easily and non-contentiously, and get on with.
We have to do all we can to ensure that the reporting commission is part of a wider effort to lift the blight of paramilitarism from the people of Northern Ireland. It is not realistic to believe that all criminal activity, or even the criminal activity of all those who have in the past been involved in paramilitary organisations, will be lifted from our community. But the notion of political motivation for organised crime must go, and this Bill is a helpful step in that direction.
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