My Lords, this has been a very interesting short debate. The Opposition will—reluctantly—support the Government on this, but I endorse what the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, just said. It is with reluctance because, although obviously it is important to get as much consent and consensus as possible, the invocation of the principle of consent, as defined in the Good Friday agreement, is not absolutely right in this context.
Like the noble Lords, Lord Empey and Lord Trimble, I was heavily involved in establishing the Good Friday agreement and chaired many of the talks that led up to it being signed in 1998. I have to say that the definition of consent that the Minister referred to, as it applies to this issue, is not quite right. The main reason for that is that the consent, as opposed to the consent to get either a united Ireland or to remain as part of the United Kingdom, for other issues within the Good Friday agreement was based on agreement: it was based on consensus. The problem here is that because, among other things, the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive were not operating when all these negotiations took place, no one in Northern Ireland has really had any say on Brexit or the protocol, in the way that they did when the Good Friday agreement was constructed.
Some people say that the Good Friday agreement could have been written in a few weeks. That may well be the case—but it would have failed, because the agreement had to be written by the people involved on both sides, with the parity of esteem that is the central part of the Good Friday agreement. The fact that there was nobody involved in the working out of the protocol or the withdrawal agreement, or of course the particular issue we are dealing with today, means that it has been in a sense imposed on the people of Northern Ireland—and that is very unfortunate.
The other issue of course is that there is a bit of a muddle about what consent is. Is it a simple majority or cross-community approval? They are two very different issues. The absence of Northern Ireland people as Members of either the Executive or the Assembly in establishing what has now happened to Northern Ireland because of the withdrawal agreement and the protocol has meant that there has been a deep misunderstanding about how these issues work.
The other issue of course is that the majority of people in Northern Ireland actually voted to remain in the European Union. Of course, we voted as a United Kingdom to stay in or go out, but it is a factor that people in Northern Ireland voted to remain and a substantial minority voted to leave. So there is a divided position in Northern Ireland. That is all the more reason why consensus among people, and particularly among politicians in Northern Ireland, would have been much more acceptable than the situation we are in today. So to invoke the consent issue as defined in the Good Friday agreement does not work. I understand the plight of the Government, and the need to try to get that consensus. This is a genuine attempt to do it, but it will be very difficult.
The other problem is that this has the potential to create enormous instability every four years. In between in Northern Ireland, there are elections for local government, elections to the Assembly and elections to Parliament. All those things are destabilising in themselves, but the fact that the Assembly then has to vote in the way that is prescribed by this statutory instrument is indeed a recipe for instability over the next eight years.
I honestly do not know what the alternative is, but I must say that this is not ideal—far from it—and it is a great pity indeed that the Northern Ireland Executive and the Assembly were not functioning when all this was agreed, because frankly they would have come up with a solution that would have been better than the one we have today.
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