My Lords, I welcome the Minister to the Front Bench and caution him that he needs to decipher carefully the information that he gets from Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Office, as his predecessor discovered. It is well known that I asked his predecessor how often the present Secretary of State had consulted the noble Lords, Lord Alderdice, Lord Empey, Lord Trimble and Lord Kilclooney, and me—five who had been engaged in the Belfast agreement and had some experience of the difficulties. I was told in the Answer that he regularly meets us, notifies us, and so on. If I can be non-political about it, that was a contrived inexactitude. We talk about getting a solution, but Members of this House—the most experienced people in the field—are by and large ignored. As we move forward, I appeal that that ignoring of noble Lords from Northern Ireland not continue. Without consultation, we will be in massive difficulty.
I shall illustrate that. I have very little to which I shall ask the Minister to respond tonight, but I will ask him to take note. On three occasions, I asked about the abuse of proxy voting in Northern Ireland. Proxy voting has increase by 550% since 2010. Proxy voting increased by 800% in Foyle constituency. We were complaining about the lack of nationalists in the House of Commons, and I regret that very much. That is where a constitutional nationalist lost his seat. I asked three times and was told, “Oh the chief electoral officer will sort it out”. It is a political problem that the present Secretary of State does not have the guts to tackle, and there is no point leaving it to the chief electoral officer.
We have to be discerning as to where and when our Civil Service is allowing itself to be or is being manipulated by whomever. I had a quite nasty experience. When I was 75 my driving licence was out of date. I applied for one and got my GP to put in the normal piece about me being fit to drive, and so on. A young man, a Mr Paul Duffy, decided that he wanted my medical records. I said that I would bring them to the doctor. “We don’t employ a doctor”, he told me. When I asked
what he would do with my medical records, he said that they would be safe enough in a drawer in his office. It got to the stage that I beat him down after 22 months, and he handed me my driving licence on 6 May 2015. I got into my car and drove off. He went upstairs and watched me driving on to the main road with my new licence, and reported me to the police. I told the police that I now had a licence and when they looked at it, it was dated one day after the day it was handed over to me. That sort of behaviour goes on across the Civil Service in Northern Ireland. I do not want to damn every civil servant; I have huge regard for a lot of them, but we cannot go on allowing abuse.
I conclude simply by saying that the Irish language Bill has nothing to do with the Irish language which has always prospered in Northern Ireland throughout my 80 years. It has to do with arranging a system whereby there will have to be quotas in the courts, the police and in all public bodies. There will be a quota system based on whether someone can speak the Irish language and there will be another confrontation and more trouble.
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