My Lords, I have frequently felt moved to speak in this House about the suffering that has been endured across Northern Ireland and which is obviously the centre of the approach of this legislation. However, we have also had occasions to be reminded that so little of our society finds, in this proposed legislation, anything that they can have confidence in.
On one occasion in Committee, I centred on the use of the word “reconciliation” in the title of the Bill. The speeches we have heard tonight come from the heart of people who have intimate knowledge of what they are talking about—people who have carried, and through their families have carried, scars over the years. For myself, there are numerous occasions upon which I have tried to bring comfort and reconciliation, in ordinary terms, to people. In the rawness of what we have heard tonight, this is really taking us now to the centre. We are not dealing with the niceties of this legislation. We are being reminded that the rawness of the suffering of ordinary people has brought us to this point.
I have no hesitation in saying that I have total dismay when I look at this legislation. So much could have been achieved. So much was expected, when we were told it was coming, and so little has been achieved, in what we have listened to and discussed. Now we are talking about how future generations will be told about our Troubles. We are told of the need to have an official history. My heavens, do we understand the first fact of what we are talking about when we refer to an “official history” of the Troubles? I venture to suggest it is an impossibility. The history of the Troubles is the photograph on the mantelpiece; the insertion on an anniversary; the plaque on a wall of the church, or a memorial window. The history of the Troubles is when a mother says, “Please, let me know the truth, before I die, of what happened”. And we turn around and produce ways of limiting inquiries, investigations, and questioning—not in the purely legal sense, but in the sense in which normal suffering people are crying out for answers. We have fallen so far short in this legislation of doing that.
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I do not want to add to the agony that we have listened to this evening, but I would be failing all I have tried to stand for and what I have tried to achieve over my adult life if I did not say these things at this point. I say to the Minister that I have the utmost respect and admiration for the way in which he has tried to grapple over the months of discussions and analysis that have gone into our proceedings. I have nothing but admiration for him as a person, but I also recognise that he is trapped. He is trapped because the purpose of this legislation was to try to draw a line at last under the agony of Northern Ireland—to say at last, “That’s it; we can say it’s over. It will be wonderful; we’ve got this legislation. It deals with ABCD and it even proposes an official history of the Troubles of Northern Ireland”.
When I meet, as I still do, widows or children then, who are now adults, who will never see their father come home again—either because he wore a uniform or because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time as a civilian—whether they were Roman Catholic or Protestant, it does not matter; it is irrelevant, because the raw truth of the Troubles is that it was evil. It was the failure of society to grapple with its own past that allowed these things to happen.
I am not going to give a sermon but I will say that I have seen faith, courage and strength over the years which are truly remarkable, and I have seen the depths to which others have sunk. So, at this stage, as I wait to hear the response of the Minister once more to what he has had to listen to on the Floor of the House, my plea is simply this: let us be realistic, let us be honest and, when we talk about such things as the official history of all this agony, let us recognise what in fact we are asking for. The memory that I believe Northern Ireland society needs more than any other memory at the moment is the recognition of the human suffering of so many.