| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Mallon: The Ulster Unionist party?
Rev. Ian Paisley: I want to know what anyone is up to. I was amazed by the dialogue tonight between the Ulster Unionist party and the Social Democratic and Labour party. I never knew that we all agreed to mutual decommissioning. The official Unionists may have agreed that with the SDLP and vice versa, but I never agreed it, as I have made clear. The hon. Gentleman will have heard long speeches from me without hearing one line in which I said that, because I do not believe in it.
Today, there are two so-called army councils, the IRA Army Council and the Combined Loyalist Military Command--high-falutin' titles. Those two bodies hold a noose around the neck of Northern Ireland and say, "If you don't give in to us, we'll give you your bellyful of what we've given you in the past," and the two Governments sit and compromise with them.
I heard the Secretary of State saying that the Combined Loyalist Military Command should be "helped forward" because of its stand, but I do not think that anyone here today knows who its members are. Who could stand up and say that they can name the men? They are faceless people, and if hon. Members are so foolish as to think that Garry McMichael and Councillor Hughie Smith are the generalissimos commanding that body, they are sadly mistaken.
The Secretary of State seems to think that schoolboys, rather than politicians, are the right audience for his major speeches. He made a major speech to some schoolboys in Londonderry the other day and told them that the Combined Loyalist Military Command ceasefire was holding. I wish that he would come with me to see some of the people who have been beaten up on the orders of that group, the people who have been partially crucified and the homes that have been wrecked.
Last Sunday, a member of my church went home to be told by the police that he had to shift house, get out, pull up all his chattels, take his family and go--and yet we are told that the ceasefire is intact and all is well. All is not well in Northern Ireland, and the people are getting sick
16 Jan 1997 : Column 487
It has been argued today that the military, the police, security and legislation have failed, and that we need another method. Spokesmen for the IRA have been advancing that argument for years. They say that they have won the war and that we have to sit down with them and make peace. In fact, the war has never been fought. There is one reason for that: the people most concerned were not allowed to fight it.
When Northern Ireland became a state, the same forces that are operating today tried to break and destroy it, and the ordinary people of Northern Ireland fought and won the battle against them. They did it because they were fighting for their hearth-stones, for the land where their fathers lay awaiting resurrection, for their country. We, on the other hand, have not had a battle with the IRA. The IRA has never felt the determination of the Ulster people. We are marginalised and told to keep quiet and let others take care of everything.
With all due respect to the hon. Member for Newry and Armagh, one would have thought that, with all the years that have passed, the Dublin Government would have extradited a person accused of a terrorist bombing in Germany. The extradition would not even have been to the United Kingdom, but would have been to another country in the European Union, yet that man thumbed his nose and walked out of court. If that is how we intend to fight terrorism, we will be defeated all down the line.
The Government and hon. Members should go to Northern Ireland and talk not to politicians, but to people who are not active in politics. People in the professional and business worlds, trade unionists and others have at long last realised how serious the situation is. People are asking why they are held in a noose by two outlawed councils of thuggery and murder and why we have to deal with them. We cannot run a country by telling criminals that, if they mutually agree something, we will go ahead and do it. That is what the Bill does. It is not worth the paper it is written on because it says that, until those two councils of thugs and outlaws agree to hand in their arms, nothing shall be done.
I came to the House in 1970. I never thought that I would be here so long or that I would ever discuss a Bill such as this in the United Kingdom, which boasts of its belief in the democratic process. Tonight we are passing a Bill that tells two outlawed so-called military councils of terrorists that nothing will be done until they mutually agree. That is not law; it is capitulation and concession to the men of violence. The tragedy is that not hon. Members, but the people of Ulster, will reap the sad results. The House is sowing the wind but those people will reap the whirlwind. Hon. Members should go to Northern Ireland and talk not to politicians, but to ordinary people, who are becoming alarmed at how far the Government and the talks are seeking to take them.
Finally, I say to the hon. Member for Newry and Armagh that I will be at no talks with this crowd. I do not believe that the people who sit at the talks at the moment have clean hands. There should be one law right across the board: if they do not go by the principles that they
16 Jan 1997 : Column 488
Mr. Robert McCartney:
There are few hon. Members who do not utterly abhor violence and would not like it to end. Those present probably have no quarrel with the particularities of the Bill. The question is how relevant the legislation is to the state of affairs in Northern Ireland. To see its relevance, one has to look at the general picture.
In my view, there never was such a creature as the so-called peace process. It was apparent to several political thinkers in Northern Ireland, and in the United Kingdom, that at some time in or about 1988 or 1989, there was a change in direction in British policy away from an attempt to accommodate the nationalist minority in Northern Ireland in a settlement within the United Kingdom to a new policy that involved the appeasement of the violent aspect of Irish nationalism. There was an attempt to discover on what terms an accommodation could be made with violent republicanism in the form of the IRA.
The philosophy was essentially laid in the initial negotiations that took place between the leader of the SDLP and Mr. Gerry Adams, the titular head of Sinn Fein and some time participant in IRA activity. They laid the foundations for the policy that subsequently emerged, through the Brooke-Mayhew talks, as the peace process. Essentially, the peace process was that an arrangement would be made whereby a meeting of democrats would not be used to settle the political problems of Northern Ireland; instead, a collection of democrats would be got together to give a veneer of democratic responsibility to what was really a peace conference between two sets of combatants: the British state and the representatives of violent republican terrorism.
The foundations were consolidated by secretive meetings between representatives of the Secretary of State and the IRA in 1992-93. Out of that emerged the Downing street declaration, in which the British Government declared that in respect of part of the territory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, they no longer had any selfish strategic or economic interest in maintaining that portion of the United Kingdom within the kingdom. They would agree to act, if not as persuaders, as facilitators for a solution of Irish unity. It is true that it was declared that no other solution would be excluded but it is more important to note that no solution other than Irish unity was adumbrated in the Downing street declaration.
The declaration was careful never to describe the majority of the citizens of Northern Ireland as British citizens. They were described as the people of Ireland north and south, or as those Irish people living in Northern Ireland. Never once were the 1 million British citizens who describe themselves as, and claim to be, British citizens described as such. More interestingly, the phrase about Britain having no selfish economic or strategic interest was not new. It had become an official declaration of policy, but it was not a novel statement. It had been made in 1991 by the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for City of London and Westminster, South (Mr. Brooke). However, he got the phrase from the public,
16 Jan 1997 : Column 489
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |