| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Robert McCartney: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, to a large extent, it is the national parties in this place which have contributed to communal politics in Northern Ireland, in so far as someone like me, who supports the socio-economic politics of Labour, and is a British citizen, is incapable of becoming a member of the Labour party? If there is a wish for political miscegenation, it is time that something was done to bring it about.
Mr. McAvoy: New Labour might even reach the far-flung province of Devizes. We never know what will happen.
At the risk of sounding intellectual, we are collectively responsible, in a sense, for all the faults and problems of our society. I think that the Social Democratic and Labour party would accept that. We are all responsible also to ensure that the men and women of violence do not destroy the process that lies before us. In a different context, it seems clear that in Israel and Palestine, the extremists on either side of the conflict are determined to sabotage any chance of peace in the middle east by means of explosions, assassinations, terrorism and violence generally.
We must ensure that we do not overreact to events of the sort that took place last night. It is clear that someone was intent on trying to send a message to the House. The explosion took place fewer than 24 hours before we began consideration of the Bill. It was a disgrace. We should not bow down to the men and women of violence by allowing such an incident to throw us off track.
Mr. Ken Maginnis (Fermanagh and South Tyrone):
My party and I welcome the concept of elections to a forum from which negotiators will be able to try to bring about solutions to the political problems of Northern Ireland. We cannot, however, ignore the recent past, during which we have endeavoured to negotiate our way through a non-elected body. In 1992, we had the unhappy experience of putting a great deal of effort into negotiations that fell apart because some parties did not have a mandate from the electorate. Many of them were present with another agenda, one entirely different from the main agenda to which my party sought to adhere.
It is no secret that the Social Democratic and Labour party has produced some genuine negotiators, but the SDLP has an autocratic management. The progress that was made for days on end was suddenly undermined when the leader of the SDLP arrived on the scene. We now understand why that happened. There was an entirely different sideshow, of which we were unaware at the time.
The hon. Member for Foyle (Mr. Hume) was engaged in negotiations with Sinn Fein. Before anyone decides that that is worth defending and that those negotiations brought about a ceasefire that endured for 17 months--we are always happy if there is no violence; when we awake and find that no violence has taken place, it is an occasion on which to thank God--it is now clear, as history has proven, that it was not a genuine ceasefire.
The intentions of the leader of the SDLP, the hon. Member for Foyle, were no doubt of the utmost integrity, but he let down the peace process that took place in 1994. He did not draw the terrorists into a permanent ceasefire. Instead, he opened a window of opportunity for them to exploit the political situation at the very moment when they, the terrorists, were coming under stress and strain. It was a time when their organisation was leaking and when the rate of attrition by the Royal Ulster Constabulary was the highest that it had ever been. It was a time when the IRA was running out of funds. The window of political opportunity was open.
Bearing in mind what happened last night in London, we see the outcome of negotiations in which those taking part were not directly and specifically mandated by the electorate. I shall return to the significance of what has happened over the past few months, including what happened last night.
My party is disquieted, to put it mildly, by the form of election that the Government have proposed. I seldom agree with the hon. Member for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn), but he rightly said that we have never had an election in the United Kingdom based on party names. We have never voted for parties. People in Northern Ireland vote for people. It is people voting for people who sustain democracy. That system makes the process meaningful. It is an approach that creates accountability for us all. Each one of us is accountable to his or her electorate. Our electorates identify with us because they have chosen us as individuals. To ask the electorate to vote for a party is to play into the hands of parties that have an autocratic structure. We all know which those parties are in Northern Ireland. We have heard a Member of one of those parties this evening say that it is not good enough to have the party name, because one must be able to identify the party for the electorate, and ask how it is proposed to identify that specific party for the electorate. A party leader's name will be introduced on the ballot paper.
What is happening is the antithesis of democracy as we know it. It is a slap-happy and shoddy way of dealing with the needs of society in Northern Ireland. It is driving people into particular camps. People are not being given the opportunity to have a second choice. Some people's first choice may be to vote for Ulster Unionism, but their second choice might well be across the traditional divide and a vote for the SDLP, or vice versa. I am sure that that could and should happen, but we do not have that opportunity now. One is asked to stake one's future within a particular camp. One X for a political party. It is wrong.
Rev. Martin Smyth:
Does my hon. Friend admit that such people will not necessarily be transferring from one party to another, but moving from one candidate to another whom they know?
Mr. Maginnis:
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is the nature of society in Northern Ireland, despite our
That is sad when one considers the difficulties that we shall encounter the day and hour that we sit down in the forum. We have the difficulty of whether people standing for election will genuinely eschew violence. What, I wonder, shall we do when a Sinn Fein-IRA candidate--the sort of person whom I mentioned earlier in an intervention--arrives and signs the declaration in private, gives it to the returning officer and says, "I am now a candidate under the Sinn Fein banner"? Or that may be done under the banner of some other paramilitary organisation.
One thing that we must ensure is that the declaration is made not just in private, but in a more public way so that, at the very outset of the operation of the forum, a document is read publicly in a fashion similar to that which occurs in the House when new Members take the oath either by swearing on the Bible or by affirming. If such a document can enshrine the principles that derive from the Mitchell report, there will at least be further evidence for the public at large that the Government are endeavouring to ensure that genuine people are being charged with and made responsible for the negotiations and those things pertaining to negotiations from within the forum.
I talked about the difficulties that we shall encounter. Let us consider for a moment what happened last night. Some people dismiss it almost as a signal. It was more than a signal. IRA-Sinn Fein have discovered that there is nothing for them within the democratic process. They have been wedded for ever, it seems, to the violence that they have perpetrated for 26 years. They have discovered something that rather disconcerts them--that the people of Northern Ireland and the people of the United Kingdom will withstand their violence for as long as they have to. They recognise that Sinn Fein has the support of only 4.8 per cent. of the electorate, because 95 per cent. of the people have not voted for Sinn Fein-IRA. I do not exclude loyalist paramilitaries or their horrible deeds from my criticism, but they have never attracted even 1 per cent. of the support of the total electorate.
The IRA will not win militarily and it must decide whether to continue killing for the sake of killing; whether to continue its violence for the sake of violence. It does not seem to make sense. Therefore, it considers how it can exploit the political scene. That, believe it or not, has been its first and major mistake. The day and hour that it entered the political arena was the beginning of the defeat of the IRA. I do not use the word defeat to incite it to further violence. I know that it can kill tonight or tomorrow night. What I am saying is that it has lost the intellectual and the ideological argument that somehow, from days of yore, motivated its movement.
If that is the case, the IRA has compounded its difficulty by moving into the international arena because, by doing so, it has placed itself under the scrutiny of the
international community. What will the international community say if, once again, it moves into a ceasefire insincerely and then backs out into its violence?
The IRA's dilemma is not whether it moves from violence to the democratic process. If that was its problem, it would have been resolved by the setting of the date for all-party talks which it demanded. Once it got that, it realised its true dilemma, which is at what level to pitch its violence today and tomorrow so as to retain some of the sympathy and the folklore that has sustained it from the United States and elsewhere.
That brings us to the real function of the election and the forum. Because, hear what I say, the IRA is defeated. It is finished. It has nothing to offer. It is, therefore, to the constitutional nationalists, more than the Unionists, more than the Government, more than the House, that the responsibility falls. What do they want for Ireland?
We have heard powerful and effective words about how we share the island. It all sounds very good. We have listened to and read over and over the words of the Downing street declaration--the will of the people of Northern Ireland first and foremost; the consent that is necessary. What does it mean if it does not assume some sort of tangible form in respect of the day-to-day affairs of society in Northern Ireland--how an administration can function in order to serve that society more effectively?
As we move into elections, as a Unionist, I feel no sense of shame, of having unnecessarily to humble myself, in appealing to the constitutional nationalist parties throughout Ireland, including the Government in Dublin and all the other constitutional nationalist parties in the Irish Republic, to examine exactly what they mean when they say to us, "We want to be your neighbours. We want to work with you. We recognise the democratic right of the people of Northern Ireland to consent to their own future." Can they show us what they mean by that? Do the Social Democratic and Labour party, a very powerful and influential party in Northern Ireland, and the other constitutional nationalist parties, realise the potential that there is in coming together within a forum?
Can the Secretary of State not see, when he looks at the purpose for which the forum is being elected, that he will deprive society in Northern Ireland of an opportunity to live and work together politically if he restricts the time for which the forum is able to function? I see a contradiction between schedule 2 and clause 3(4) of the Bill, which says:
the forum--
But paragraph 2(3) of schedule 2 says:
The 60 or 70 people sitting in the forum must not be constrained by the other 50--far too many--who are taking part in negotiations. They must be able to work in committees, to support what is being investigated by the negotiators as a possible way forward. There will be times when the negotiators will run up against difficulties and
will want to refer the matter to the forum for investigation, for the taking of evidence. That is an important role, and it will continue to involve those who elect members. There will be a conditioning of our entire society, I hope, for some form of agreement, whereby each tradition will know that it will not get everything that it wants, and that reality need not come as a shock at the end of the process. People need to know what is happening and to have confidence in what is happening as we move through the process.
"But if, in accordance with any rules and procedure adopted by them,"--
"the participants in the negotiations refer any matter to the forum, subsection (3) shall not be taken to prevent the forum from considering that matter."
"But the forum shall not meet at any time notified by the Secretary of State to the chairman as being a time when, in the opinion of the Secretary of State, it would not be appropriate for the forum to meet because negotiations within section 2 may take place."
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |