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Mr. Ken Maginnis (Fermanagh and South Tyrone): What a wonderful world it would be if everything was perfect. Unfortunately, the past few hours have shown us that we live in a far from perfect world. We live in a world where we are bound, at times, to travel along a route that we know, in our heart of hearts, is full of pitfalls. However, if we fail to travel along that route, we run the risk of being labelled dogs of war. That is what we have experienced in Northern Ireland and throughout the kingdom over the past 17 months.
The Prime Minister and others were persuaded of a certain hypothesis--a hypothesis that IRA-Sinn Fein wished to move from a mode of violence to a mode of democracy. If the Prime Minister and the Government had not explored that hypothesis, there would have been cries that there on the Government Benches were the dogs of war.
When we consider the Bill, we must bear in mind the reality and the lessons of the past 18 months. The facts are that IRA-Sinn Fein is an organisation that is well tutored in every aspect of guerilla warfare and in every aspect of terrorism. To introduce the video recording of interviews with terrorists at this time is to lessen the benefit that those interviews will have in terms of the police bringing people to justice and garnering high-grade intelligence which is necessary to protect our society.
I assure the House that the IRA is not composed of hawks and doves. It is not composed of those who wish to pursue a course of violence and those who are against such a course. It is composed of those who carry out ruthless killings and those who are efficient as members of a propaganda corps in confusing international opinion and, I am sad to say, opinion at home about the extent and brutality of the horrors.
Unfortunately, there are elements within the press and media who have believed for years that Gerry Adams will lead the IRA out of violence and into the democratic mode. That is not so. The same people have persuaded
the Government, through their advisers, that it will be a good thing to have video recordings in the holding centres. That will not be a good thing.
The House needs to understand how terrorists behave when they are taken into the holding centres. They are not innocent people who are brought in off the streets for no good reason. The people who are brought to the holding centres are, by and large, those who are involved in terrorism. It is not always possible to get the evidence of that involvement so that they can be brought through the courts and convicted. However, I know of few people in recent times--I am talking about the past decade--who have been brought into holding centres who have been totally innocent of involvement in terrorist activity.
When those people come into the holding centres, they are already conditioned about how they should behave when questioned by detectives. They indulge in the most bizarre activities. Those activities may be anything from concentrating on the cracks in the wall, counting them and double-checking again, again and again, to stripping off their clothes entirely and lying naked on the floor of the room in which they are being questioned. That is done to distract and embarrass those who have the responsibility for finding out what is happening among the terrorist gangs who have roamed not only Northern Ireland but Great Britain over the past 25 years.
If we now introduce video cameras, they will be used in exactly the same way to embarrass and distract the officers who are responsible for ensuring that the people who threaten our society are removed from the streets.
In the past 10 months, the Chief Constable of the RUC has decided that the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1991 should not be used in the arrest and holding of suspected terrorists and has required policemen to use the Police and Criminal Evidence (Northern Ireland) Order 1989. That has left us with a huge gap in the intelligence that is available to the police and, to a large extent, is responsible for the fact that there have now been two explosions and other attempted explosions for which no one has been made accountable.
Two years ago, the level of intelligence was so high that we could have introduced internment--I would have had no qualms about that--to take out those who command and control the IRA throughout the whole of this kingdom. We can no longer do that, as there is a gap in the intelligence. We have been naive in believing that the terrorists were somehow sincere in their desire to move towards the democratic process.
Mr. Seamus Mallon (Newry and Armagh):
The hon. Gentleman referred at one stage to video recording, the subject of the new clause. How will the video recording of interviews embarrass those who carry out the interviews if they have acted according to all regulations and procedures?
Mr. Maginnis:
The hon. Gentleman must not be as familiar as I thought with the part of the kingdom from which I come. As soon as such video recordings are made available, every sharp lawyer in the country will want to see them to discover not so much the attitude of the policeman who is behaving properly, but the terrorist suspect who has been brought in for questioning. Therein lies the meat of the matter.
Mr. Maginnis:
The hon. Gentleman asked me a question, and I shall explain my reply. I would not wish him to leave here in ignorance. When a suspect is taken in for questioning, he will be conditioned, as I have explained--
Mr. David Trimble (Upper Bann):
He or she.
Mr. Maginnis:
He or she will have been conditioned in the past to adopt a certain pose or mode of behaviour. The hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie(Mr. Worthington) said that a camera could be mounted in the ceiling. If a camera were to be mounted there, I imagine that a suspect would be told to look at it in a fixed manner without speaking. Any evidence that he has given in response to police questions will be deemed to be an offence against the IRA code, and if he is released, he will be punished for so doing. If he is brought to court and acquitted, he will also be punished for so doing.
The camera may motivate a person who is peripherally involved--let us leave the hardest of the hard men for the time being. A person who is peripherally involved and is brought in for questioning may, in the interests of his own future or that of his family, wish to co-operate with the police. But he will be prevented from doing so because he knows that his every move will be recorded and that the recording can be asked for. If he is never brought before court and is released from custody, he could be forced to make allegations of ill-treatment. Cases will then be brought against the authorities, and the recording will be sought to see whether he infringed the IRA code. That is the danger of introducing video recordings.
Such a move would be the thin end of the wedge. The next question--as was articulated by the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie--would be, "How quickly can we move to have audio recordings added to video recordings?"
Rev. Ian Paisley (North Antrim):
When accusations are made about what went on in an interview room, there is no real way for a police officer to refute them. If such recordings were available, would not they give the police an opportunity to say, "That man was never attacked or struck, and he did not have his head banged on the wall"? That argument has been put to me forcefully by police officers, who have said that they would rather have an opportunity to refute such allegations.
Mr. Maginnis:
I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but he is harking back to a time some years ago, before the introduction of the regular medical checks that are available to suspects when they arrive at the police station and after every session of interview. A suspect could remove his clothes, rush blindly at the wall and injure himself. If that occurred, any interviewing officer should immediately bring the interviewing session to a close and should ensure that the matter is properly recorded not only by himself, but by those who were observing the--[Interruption.]
Mr. Maginnis:
Those who were observing the closed circuit television--not the video, I assure the
The difficulty for Special Branch is that it must do more than try to bring terrorists to justice. It must also try to build up a picture of the overall activity and involvement of individuals in terrorism to a level that gives us high-grade intelligence, and we will sacrifice that if we introduce video recordings.
Rev. Ian Paisley:
I refer to the man who may strip off his clothes and bang his head against a wall while being interrogated. In such a case, the interviewing officer should stop the questioning, go to those looking on and say what has happened. When such a case is revealed to the public, the argument always is that the police made the final decision. Surely if one had it on video that the man stripped off his clothes and banged his head against the wall, one would have concrete evidence that it had nothing to do with the police. We are all aware that every time these things happen, the police are the scapegoat and people say, "That is just another policeman packing up his felon."
5.15 pm
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