My Lords, I intervene not as an Irish person but as someone who comes from another Celtic country, which has found another way of dealing with potential and actual terrorism, and that is called political democracy. It has been a terrible thing that, throughout so much of modern Irish history, the tendency has been to equate democratic practices and human rights with one side and not with another.
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I was much minded by the wonderful speech of a great man, Arthur Griffith, in passing the Irish Free State treaty of 1922. There did not seem to him to be a living Ireland. There was the “dead past” and the “prophetic future”, both of which were shrouded in unreality, even though the reality was the terrible atrocities of which we have heard.
With deep respect and sympathy for colleagues from Northern Ireland, I would say that we ought not to equate terrorism with one set of values, very commonly the nationalist set of values. We should seek a democratic political solution, as we have in Wales and, with certain difficulties that we are all aware of, in Scotland. In my view, it would be truer to the aspirations of the one-time leader of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith, if one conducted affairs in that peaceful, tolerant and open-minded way.