My Lords, I speak to support Amendments 117 and 118 in my name but agree with the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, as well.
I want to look at the academic research clause, because it addresses a problem with the Government’s funding body, UK Research and Innovation and its councils. Many of us interested in legacy are genuinely concerned about what seems to be the one-sided nature of much of the academic research into our past and the way that the funding has been monopolised by what could be seen as a single legal view that is radical and investigates only faults with the UK state and its security responses during the Troubles.
I need to refer to the Queen’s University Belfast’s transitional justice department, which produced the model legacy Bill and many briefings that Opposition and Cross-Bench Peers will have been provided with. That department alone has received the huge amount of £4 million in funding for legacy research—nobody else has. The transitional justice department works in open conjunction with the Committee on the Administration of Justice, the CAJ, which is a largely anti-state nationalist body in Belfast that encourages legacy litigation. Indeed, it is leading efforts to get the Dublin Government to take an inter-state case against the United Kingdom at the European Court of Human Rights over this very Bill once it receives Royal Assent.
6 pm
The CAJ has already had success, in that Taoiseach Varadkar announced last week in the Dáil, in response to the Sinn Féin leader, that he would indeed
“give consideration to whether an interstate case is appropriate”
at Strasbourg. The last attempt, in 2014, to reopen a judgment relating to internment in 1971 which the Strasbourg court decided in 1978 was inhuman treatment and not torture, was lost in 2018 by seven votes to one. The United Kingdom already appears before the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers every quarter on legacy and regularly gets beaten up by the Secretariat on a batch of cases, including those of the McKerr group, involving the deaths of IRA men and Pat Finucane, that go back as far as 1982.
What I want to see today is a recognition by the Minister that, when the Government are looking at how this money is being allocated, there will be an attempt to be much more even-handed. Just recently, the Queen’s University transitional justice department had seminars during the April celebration of the Belfast Agreement’s 25th anniversary, and they were drawn from only one outlook. Any other university would have been embarrassed at such shameless bias. The Minister will know what I mean in relation to being put on the naughty step during those kinds of meetings.
The exact wording of my amendment stems from an Answer I received on 8 November last year from the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. He said that:
“UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funding is allocated according to research excellence as assessed by independent peer review”.
But we are all aware that peer reviews, as I mentioned in Committee, can often become chum reviews, even self-generated assessments, especially when few other
academics work in the same field. One academic who does speak out, Dr Cillian McGrattan, wrote that
“the UKRI record does not bode well for the government’s plan to create a multi-disciplinary history that encourages the acceptance of ‘different narratives’ that transcend and challenge ethnic taboos”.
This lack of balance in legacy and justice at Queen’s University makes it essential that the Bill has extra safeguards on academic diversity and fair funding. I really hope that the Minister will tell us how he is going to ensure that this will happen, and that he will be as positive as his own amendments—Amendments 115, 119 and 121, introducing the concept of anti-sectarianism into the Bill regarding Troubles research. I do not intend to move a Division on this amendment, but I really hope that the Minister, and those listening to this debate behind the scenes, will recognise that there is bias and that it needs to be addressed.
My Amendment 118, which we also discussed in Committee, refers to the Bill’s required production of an analysis of patterns and themes in events during the Troubles. It would add to the specific mention of women and girls words concerning research on the experience of the gay and lesbian community. This is a small minority—just 2% of Northern Ireland’s people according to the recent census—but this community has figured centrally in disputes and debates throughout the decades, perhaps more so than any other group outside the two main communities. We all know that the process from decriminalisation to gay equality was effected in a long series of legislative steps. As I mentioned in Committee, I played a small part in that in 1994, with an amendment to keep Northern Ireland in line with the rest of Britain on the gay age of consent. I was helped by the then shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair, who helped me whip sufficient support from MPs across the parties, enabling my amendment to win by 254 votes to 141.
The particular reason that the experience of the gay community needs addressing and memorialising is that it suffered, as we all did, from death and injury through killings, bombings and shootings by illegal organisations. But it then, separately, had to face those organisations that brought further death and destruction specifically to the gay community. That occurred even after the 1995 ceasefires. Various people were killed, such as the police officer murdered by INLA in 1997 and the Reverend David Templeton murdered by the UVF in 1997. There was a series of bombings of gay venues over 30 years by the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries, and the murders of gay men, often picked off the street, especially in the darkest days of the 1970s. I note, for the record, that Strasbourg is not calling for reinvestigations into any of these cases.
Academic research can provide not just a record of those events but a valuable analysis of how life amid death was experienced. I really hope that the Minister has thought about this since Committee and will look favourably on the matter and provide more reassurance than when he said in Committee:
“The provisions of the Bill as drafted would not preclude relevant research into LGBT experiences”.—[Official Report, 11/5/23; col. 1993.]
I am afraid that inclusion of such research is needed, not a lack of precluding such research. Indeed, if the Northern Ireland Office is requiring in draft regulations, as it is this month, that our schools update their teaching on sexuality, it would seem very strange that it cannot allow this to happen and be put into this Bill.
I said earlier that I was involved with whipping back in the 1994 amendment. I would like to press this vote today if the Minister does not accept it, but I have not actually got round to the whipping and asked anyone to join me. I will wait to hear how the Minister responds before deciding whether to press the vote.