This has been a powerful debate in many ways. I suppose it should be, bearing in mind what has happened in Northern Ireland over 40 years. This part of the Bill was meant to be the easy bit but it is not; as noble Lords have heard over the past hour or so, it is possibly even more difficult than the rest of this legislation.
I remember vividly going to Northern Ireland to help chair the talks on the Good Friday agreement, back in 1997. About 10 months in, I was chairing strand 1 of the talks and I had had enough of history by then. I told the people at the talks that I had spent 17 years of my life before I became an MP teaching history but had had enough of it, 10 months into the talks. I suddenly realised that it was a bit daft to say that because the people in those talks were revealing their past in a very special way. Looking back, I can see that there were not just one or two but even more versions of the same history, in exactly the same place, and we have heard a bit about that in today’s debate. That is not easy.
6.45 pm
The noble Lord, Lord Patten, mentioned the word “intimacy”. In all the contributions that we have heard—for example, from the noble and right reverend Lord,
Lord Eames—it is about individual human beings and what they have suffered. It struck me within days when I went to Northern Ireland that every single family I met had a story to tell, and usually a terrible story about someone being killed or injured. When you look at the figures of 3,500 people killed over 30 years in a very small place, and perhaps 50,000 injured, you realise how tremendously difficult it was.
They sent me to South Africa some years later to see the South African peace and reconciliation process. I quickly came to the conclusion that that was not going to work in Northern Ireland. South Africa is a huge continent of a country; Northern Ireland is a place with just over 1.5 million people, where everyone knows everyone else. As a consequence, we have to look at these issues differently. I do not think for one second that we should not try to tackle them, but neither should we pretend that it is easy. Frankly, I am not sure that legislation is the answer. Yes, we should remember and perhaps we should memorialise, but we should never memorialise violence, death, misery and mayhem; that is terrible and you can never justify it. You can perhaps understand why people do it but never justify it.
I look forward to what the Minister has to say. Everything in the Bill, all the time, should be underpinned by reconciliation. Whatever happens regarding memorialisation and history telling, that ultimately should be the final aim.