| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Sir Patrick Mayhew: I hope that my hon. Friend will not overlook the fact that I have made it clear that, at the very beginning of the negotiations, once a ceasefire has been restored in the terms of August 1994, it will be necessary for Sinn Fein and all other parties to give an absolute commitment to each and every one of the Mitchell commission's principles on democracy and non-violence. Those principles were dwelt on at great length and to great effect by the hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble). I therefore hope that my hon. Friend will not overlook the true effect of that.
Mr. Wilshire: I note what my right hon. and learned Friend says. I think that the record will show that my interpretation was correct. What I have just heard again suggests that the Government will consider allowing into the start of the talks a party that has restored only a temporary truce; only then will there be discussions as to permanence. That confirms my point. The participants will not first be required to renounce violence for ever.
Mr. Robert McCartney: Does the hon. Gentleman appreciate that neither the Secretary of State nor the Opposition spokesman will use the dreaded word "permanent", because they are both well aware that if they use the word there will be no prospect of getting Sinn Fein into the democratic loop of discussions? It may not be wanted, but it will certainly never come in if it is required to give an assurance that it will never return to violence, because violence--in the absence of a real mandate--is the only card it holds.
Mr. Wilshire: I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. and learned Gentleman. Unfortunately, far too few people understand that fundamental point. That is why I chose to remind the House of the importance of permanence.
I have never had any doubt--if anyone else has, he should look at the evidence--that Sinn Fein-IRA have, to this day, only one objective. They will use discussion if
they believe that that will help them, but if they think that it will not help them, they remain committed to bombing and shooting into submission anyone foolish enough or weak enough to believe that it is possible to humour evil terrorists. That is the message on which the hon. and learned Gentleman and I wholeheartedly agree.
Paragraph 17 refers to the six Mitchell principles, but it stops short of insisting that all participants sign up to all six principles, without exception. It also stops short of insisting that they sign up to them before anything else happens. I am not reassured by the word "addressing". It would be perfectly possible to arrive at the negotiating table every day of the discussions, to say "good morning" to the document containing the principles, and then to carry on. It simply will not do.
I know that some will say that I am attempting to introduce preconditions, but that is a sterile debating point. The fact is that, without a permanent ceasefire and without complete acceptance of the Mitchell principles, there will not be all-party talks. Some will say that I am demanding that Sinn Fein-IRA, or the Protestant paramilitaries for that matter, make a concession. I am not ashamed of that; for the past 18 months, the Government and this House have given concession after concession to the men of violence, and they have yet to concede a single thing. So I am not worried by the accusation that I may be asking for a concession: it is about time there was one.
Rev. Ian Paisley:
I think the hon. Gentleman will agree that the joint communique from both Prime Ministers spelled out clearly that there must be more than just an "addressing" of the Mitchell report. It said that the parties were to sign up to the Mitchell report, and deal with decommissioning as well. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that there is a tendency to weaken those requirements in the new structures set forth by the Government.
Mr. Wilshire:
That has certainly been my understanding of what has been said time and again, which is why I am deeply suspicious of what I read in the Command Paper. I see no such requirements set out there. I have long since learnt that such omissions are not due to sloppy draftsmanship. I must therefore ask myself why the requirement has been omitted. Hence the need to amend the Bill.
My fourth basic worry arises from paragraph 10, which refers to the validation of any all-party talks by means of a referendum. In rather strange language, this paragraph mentions
not in Northern Ireland and the Republic. Until that is changed, I shall remain deeply suspicious of what is intended. I have been involved long enough to know that every word and phrase in every Northern Ireland document is there for a purpose. I should be most interested to hear my right hon. and learned Friend explain this phrase.
Another worry about paragraph 10 is that it does not commit either Government to accepting the verdict of the people. The Bill and the document merely make provision to ask the people for their views. Nowhere that I can see do they confirm that the assent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland will be binding. That must be put right on Monday and Tuesday of next week.
I have, as I said, a number of other reservations too, but they are best left to our detailed discussion on Monday. Both the Bill and the Command Paper need serious clarification next week if they are to be acceptable to us. Much of the detail in the Command Paper must find its way into the Bill itself. I therefore urge the Government to look hard at ways of doing that over the coming weekend.
Mr. Eddie McGrady (South Down):
I apologise to the House and to the Secretary of State for the absence of my colleagues and myself during the opening moments of the right hon. and learned Gentleman's address, but our deputy leader was taken ill. He apologises for not being in the Chamber this afternoon. In that regard, I understand that the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Miss Hoey) made a critical comment about our absence, but I am sure that she would not have done so if she had been aware of the circumstances.
I speak about the Bill as the representative of the party to which the majority of nationalists living in Northern Ireland give their support and as the representative of a community whose consent to the structures in place over them historically was never asked, earned or given. My colleagues and I have spent a political lifetime combating the violence that flowed from that political failure, due in large measure to the mistakes made over the years around the British Cabinet table and in the House. Our electors have learnt from their particular bitter experience to approach the prospect of legislation by Westminster not with hope but with trepidation.
For more than a year and a half since August 1994 we had an opportunity to approach the negotiation table free from the immediate shadow of violence. The Prime Minister will remember from his reception in the town of Downpatrick in my constituency how much he was then seen as the bearer of hope. Sadly, that hope has dissipated and confidence has gone. I cannot pretend to disentangle the motives that produced so much energy to put the brake on the political momentum that could and should have come from the peace era, but there was a manifest need to build on that momentum and underpin the ceasefires through immediate unconditional negotiations and agreement. I can understand that a Unionist leadership might want to exploit the tactical advantage, but it is their nationalist neighbours, not them, whose aspirations have been denied expression. I understand that the Unionists might be tempted to follow their inherited instinct that the consent of their nationalist neighbours does not matter much. They have successfully shifted the focus of what might feature in the negotiations to whether there should be negotiations at all.
Two parties out of the total number have refused to negotiate, and those two parties are represented in the Chamber this evening. There will be an election involving
33 parties because the British Government were drawn or, for all I know, entered willingly into a Unionist-led agenda. The nationalist community took the message about the Government's priorities and, tragically, the devaluation of the ceasefire became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In striking that note, I do not want to detract from the great importance of the setting of 10 June as a fixed date for all-party talks. I want only to stress how costly has been the delay, and that the wariness and misgivings felt in my community are justified by experience, including our recent experiences. I want to stress also that the preliminaries put between us and that date in the form of the Bill make the task of negotiations more difficult and uncertain than it need have been.
The predictability of Northern Ireland's election results is proverbial. All the serious parties already have mandates. We have had 21 elections in the past 20 years, and we know that elections are deeply polarising in our community and always have been. They are about victory and defeat. An election is fought, but negotiations are about common interests and striving for compromise. However, those two contradictory things have been grouped together in the proposals, only because the Unionists wanted the ritual comfort of confirmation that there is a Unionist majority and a nationalist minority in Northern Ireland, and because the British Government failed to assert leadership in the wider common interest.
As a result, the electors are faced with an election that will distil and combine the worst features of the list and proportional representation cum constituency system. The electorate will have to choose from an array of more than 33 options in a list that reads as though it was concocted on 1 April. The Government's plans also ensure that about 70 people will be involved in each negotiating session. The mind boggles at that concept. Nevertheless, the Social Democratic and Labour party is well used to fighting and winning elections in the most difficult circumstances, and the ballot box has not and will not hold any fears for us. If the negotiations are to be truly meaningful, that unnecessary and exasperating detour may be a price worth paying--provided the negotiations seek a real and permanent solution.
More disturbing, and the part of the Bill about which I have the greatest reservations, are the provisions relating to the proposed forum. We have from the beginning made clear our strenuous opposition to the creation of an elected body within the negotiating process. Our fundamental concern is that no matter how innocuous a proposal might appear on paper, and no matter how circumscribed by legislation, we know historically that reality can be quite different. The history of such initiatives in Northern Ireland gives ample justification for our fears. Each time a consultative assembly has been set up in Northern Ireland, it has inevitably been used as a vehicle for Unionists to assert their dominance. Irrespective of the intention of British Ministers, Dr. Jekyll has the habit of becoming Mr. Hyde. Our anxiety is that a body with an in-built Unionist majority might seek to influence and control the negotiations, even if it is formally prevented from doing so. It could in those circumstances, and given certain events, poison the atmosphere through the adoption of declarations and resolutions, making progress in the real negotiations much more difficult. The negotiating process will be difficult enough without the forum acting as a rival political focus or a counterpoint to negotiation in the search for accommodation.
Any hon. Members who think that I am exaggerating should consider previous speakers' comments on the forum. I am glad that the deputy leader of the Democratic Unionist party, the hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson), is in his place because I want to quote his comments broadcast by RTE yesterday. He said:
thereby giving the forum a life and existence that the Bill alleges it will not have.
That attitude has been expressed despite the fact that we anticipate that the outcome of the negotiations will be validated by the referendum. It seems to us that the intent of the two Unionist parties--it has been expressed not only in tonight's debate--is for the forum and not the negotiating table to be the ultimate endorsement of what happens in negotiations.
The Northern Ireland Office paper of 21 March sought to allay such fears, and we understand that was its purpose. The paper said that the forum's purpose would be to promote dialogue and mutual understanding and, most important, that it would be required to proceed on a basis of broad consensus.
The requirement for broad consensus was potentially of great significance. It offered some measure of protection against majoritarian exploitation of the forum. That protection has now entirely disappeared. Schedule 2 to the Bill simply states:
It contains no requirement whatever that the forum must operate on the basis of broad consensus. We believe that there is an urgent need to include a requirement for broad consensus, as specified in paragraph 24 of Cmnd. 3232.
Schedule 2 to the Bill also proposes:
It requires a vote by not 75 per cent. of the membership but by 75 per cent. of those voting.
We were assured that the forum would not be a body with legislative, administrative or executive functions but that it would be a consultative and deliberative body charged with promoting dialogue and mutual understanding. Taking decisions on a majoritarian basis, even on a weighted basis, is surely entirely at variance with the spirit of dialogue and mutual understanding. In its procedures, the forum should practise what it is expected to preach.
What decisions will the forum take on which it should not have to operate on the basis of consensus? What dialogue and mutual understanding will be found by voting down even a quarter of the people engaged in that search
for dialogue and understanding? If the negotiations--which will deal with much more difficult and decisive subjects--are to proceed on the basis of consensus, it is hard to understand why the forum should not operate on the same basis.
I almost hesitate to refer to the Dublin forum, which was a non-elected body. In that forum, as many as 13 very diverse delegations managed, with a little common sense and a bit of give and take, to conduct the business of a body that is very similar to the one that has been proposed. The Government recognise that, in certain contexts, consensus is efficient and a necessary element for progress. To prove the point, the White Paper on the European Union states that the Government
So let it not be a constraint on the forum's development.
The fundamental error that the Government are making is to apply the logic of a decision-making body or assembly to a body or assembly that is of a quite different character, which will of course heighten concerns that their protestations about the body's nature and functions are not entirely sincere. The importation of majoritarian procedures into a body that is being operated in parallel with the negotiations creates a serious risk that the whole process could be infected or affected by those procedures.
In the interests of the negotiations and of the great goal of peace and agreement, which is the ultimate prize, members of the SDLP seek--despite the extent of our reservations about the elective process--to take a fair and positive view of the overall package that has been presented to us. Should the Bill be enacted unamended, it will be much harder for us to persuade a very suspicious nationalist community that a serious and meaningful process is on offer.
In their communique of 20 February, the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach agreed that
No sooner had the proposal of an election been nailed on the agenda--in a form that cynically devalued any concept of broad acceptability of nationalist views--than we had forced on us the further stage of a proposed forum, which is unwelcome to everyone in the nationalist community and discards the commitment to "consensus" and "broad consensus" that had been flagged in two formal Government papers.
Even if this forum were not a precondition for negotiations--I should expect the Prime Minister, under the terms of the February communique, to confirm that it is not--the loss of the element of consensus will damage, perhaps fatally, the capacity of any nationalist leader in Northern Ireland to persuade the nationalist community to view negotiations in a positive light, or other than as a threat or advance instalment of a process aimed at directing the negotiations to a totally and exclusively internal solution. We shall table amendments at the appropriate stage on those key points, but I should like to tell the House now that its decision on this issue will have a very significant symbolic and practical impact on nationalist attitudes to the proposed forum.
On behalf of my party, I welcome the publication of the Bill because it marks a staging post on the route to 10 June. I do not welcome the Bill itself. The process it defines is
unnecessary, divisive and deeply flawed. I am confident that the Bill has the potential to cause major difficulties in the future that could prejudice and jeopardise the negotiations' progress. It remains to be seen whether the Government have led us into a long and unnecessary detour or into a quagmire. Nevertheless, despite their strange decision to proceed to negotiations by this twisted and possibly potholed route, we acknowledge that the journey has begun with the Bill's introduction.
A document that is perhaps of greater relevance to the real needs of the situation was published on Tuesday as "Ground Rules for Substantive All-Party Negotiations". It essentially defines the negotiations' scope, purpose and processes. It is vital that the two Governments, acting together, have a common view of the parameters of the negotiations. My party welcomes the fact that, following a period of consultation, the Governments have reached a definitive common judgment on the most suitable and broadly accepted ground rules.
It is reassuring that the ground rules paper is, in most respects, broadly unchanged from the consultation document that was circulated to the parties on 15 March last year. The purpose of negotiations will be to achieve a new beginning for negotiations in Northern Ireland, in the island of Ireland and between the peoples of these islands. The purpose will also be to agree new institutions and structures to take account of the totality of that relationship. I hope that the three-stranded structure agreed in May 1991, which reflects the equal weight and independent standing of those three relationships, remains in place. Likewise, the vital principle that nothing will be agreed in any strand until everything is agreed in the negotiations as a whole has been preserved. The central role played together by the two Governments in the overall management of the negotiation is also essential.
It is important, however, that paragraph 7 of the paper makes it explicit that the conduct of the negotiations will be exclusively a matter for those involved in them. Any reference to or interaction with the forum may take place solely with the agreement of the negotiating teams to this effect, and only at their formal instigation--and, we hope, on the basis of consensus, as stipulated in paragraph 24 of Cmnd. 3232. It is essential that this necessary separation is preserved and, if possible, strengthened. There can be no breach of the integrity of the ground rules as a package by seeking to process the negotiations through an internalist and majoritarian filter. [Hon. Members: "Of course there can."]
It is also encouraging that the two Governments have included in the ground rules paper an explicit reference to the framework document. This serves to refocus us on the core issues to be resolved in the negotiations. For too long, quibbles over mechanics and technicalities have got in the way of discussions on the real issues. The framework document sets out the broad outline of a possible settlement that nationalists and Unionists could accept as their own.
"referendums in Ireland--North and South",
"we went over this on several occasions with Michael Ancram during the course of today. That does not stop the forum putting forward proposals which could be the same as those proposals being considered by the negotiators, and making a view known of those issues. And I'm saying that, from our party's point of view, we would not enter into any agreement, not finalise any agreement in the negotiations, which had not been endorsed by the forum"--
"The rules of procedure of the forum shall include provision for a quorum."
"A decision on the election or removal of a chairman or the adoption or alteration of rules of procedure shall not be regarded as taken by the members unless--
(a) no member present has objected to it, or
(b) it is approved on a vote by at least 75 per cent. of those voting."
"does not accept that the unanimity provisions for CFSP are a constraint on its development."
"an elective process would have to be broadly acceptable and lead immediately and without further preconditions to the convening of all-party talks".
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |