My Lords, apart from all else that has been said, this group of amendments takes the House to the substance of what is causing so much heartache, has united opposition and is destroying hopes of reconciliation back in Northern Ireland. The two words we have all used, “victims” and “survivors”, are very easy to use. When we really think about it, we are generalising in a way, which is doing immense harm to what those words mean. We are not speaking about some group that we cannot touch, hear or understand. We are talking about men and women who, perhaps two generations on in the same family, are feeling the repercussions of what we continue to call—and here is another word—the Troubles. We are talking about the need, somehow, to find a way—if this legislation is to have any use—to do something about the real faces behind “victims” and “survivors”.
I am sitting here listening to so much that has been said, and I am hearing other voices. I am hearing those countless voices I have ministered to over the years as a priest, a bishop and then an archbishop. I have listened to the service families, those who came out of
their homes and, most importantly of all, those who, when off duty, came back into their homes in the very areas where they would be in danger. Can noble Lords imagine what that was like—the constancy of anxiety and thinking about the children? One child in particular, when I had performed the burial of her father who had been slaughtered by terrorism, tugged on my robes to draw my attention and looked up at me. As I looked down at this child—I can still see her—she said, “What have you done with Daddy?” That is the sort of human reaction we are talking about this evening. We are not talking about facts—“victims” and “survivors”. We are talking about ordinary, decent people caught up in a situation that I wonder whether we will all ever understand—its causes and consequences.
I have said publicly in this House, twice at least, that I feel so strongly for the position that the Minister is in and why he has tried to do so much to feel the tenor of what we are saying to him about this legislation. I plead with him to go beyond “victims” and “survivors” to the people who are actually asking this House and the other House to treat them as human beings. That is what they are, and they are at the centre of the need in relation to which this legislation is lacking.