My Lords, as usual, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has an uncanny habit of putting his finger on something that sparks a series of comments.
I am no lawyer or expert in these matters. All I can say is that, when we came to the Belfast agreement in 1998, no agreement would have been reached had the constitution of the Irish Republic remained as it was. We had the issue of Articles 2 and 3, which claimed the territory of Northern Ireland as part of the nation. If I remember correctly, “the island and its territorial seas” was the terminology at the time. Had that remained in place, there would have been no agreement.
A treaty was eventually written to implement the agreement—although it was brought in here as the Northern Ireland Act 1998, there is of course a treaty. The Irish Republic effectively changed its constitution by referendum in 1998 to remove those offending articles. So in terms of our operational day-to-day relationships with the Republic, when we were going to meet Irish Ministers, deal with them and set up bodies with them—which, as the result of the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, appointing me to positions, I had the opportunity to do—it was clear to us that the perceived threat/claim no longer existed from a practical position.
However, the problem was demonstrated by the 1985 arrangements, when there were two separate documents, as was pointed out. There was the question of the United Kingdom being given its full title—the mirror image of this question. This country was not getting its proper legal title from the Republic. We are the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as anyone who looks at the passport will see. The Irish state was not legally permitted to acknowledge
anything other than Great Britain as part of our national territory. That was where the agreement of 1998 made progress, in that it was then accepted that we are an integral part of the United Kingdom. That had been the missing link and something that we had attempted to achieve. Several noble Lords who are here today were part of that negotiation.
So we have made huge progress. I am not qualified to judge what the international implications of this could be, but we know from dealing with this issue that things can creep in over time to dilute the agreements that we have made, because there are always people who will never give up their ultimate objectives. We know that people have been prepared to kill, be killed and do all sorts of other things to achieve an objective which does not meet with the democratic will of all of the people on the island of Ireland, as was expressed by the 1998 referendum.
Your Lordships will recall that John Hume’s argument always was that, if you got the people on the island to vote, you would undermine the arguments of 1918 and the republican movement, because you would actually get people to vote to accept the position. That was, of course, the whole purpose of the agreement. People were forced into accepting that—through gritted teeth, I suspect—and we got the vote.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for raising this matter, because it brings out whether people truly and actually believe what they have signed up to.