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Mr. William Ross: The hon. Gentleman has been explaining to the House that some people who ran processions last year are getting telephone calls from the facilitators--or whatever the Dickens they are called. How do the facilitators get hold of those names and telephone numbers? After all, the only people who should know them are the police. Did the Government release the names? If so, why?
The names are those of ordinary citizens--men and women who hold no public position whatever--and they are now being exposed in their own communities to harassment, danger, intimidation, terror and threat of death. The hon. Gentleman knows that one of the Unionist councillors elected in Londonderry in May has had to leave the city because of threats. There are supposed to be at least 30 other people under threat of death from the terrorist organisations at this moment--yet those terrorists are the people with whom we are supposed to be doing a deal.
Rev. Ian Paisley:
The only way in which people could have those names and numbers is through the applications made to the police. That is where the first names were removed. Evidently, the names came into the hands of the commission, and although it will not be fully appointed until the Bill becomes law, it is already employing people to telephone and say that they want to talk about next year.
A friend of mine who lives in the constituency of the right hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble), the leader of the Unionist party, has been called by the police and told that people want to talk to him about what is to happen in July. That is going on, and it is not right. I want the Minister to dissociate himself from that and say that there is no right to do that until the machinery is in place. That is his responsibility.
It is terrible that information about people signing a document for a parade should become public property. Information on a secretary of an organisation should be confidential to the security authorities. Everyone can be put on a death list, and everyone can be subject to intimidation from those who want to deal with the particular interest that that person has.
I was amazed that the Minister said that the body had to be representative of the people, but added that he was going to bring in people from other parts of the UK to be on the body. I do not know how in the name of goodness the Government can twist the Bill to say that the body will represent the community. A person who is not a member of that community is not in a fit position to represent it. He must be a member of the community, he must live in it and he must know something about it. It is like saying that an hon. Member should represent a constituency but should never go near it, have nothing to do with it and just tell the people what he wants.
I have heard claims about the vast majority of the people of Northern Ireland wanting this, that or the other thing. However, the people making those claims never submitted themselves to the electorate. The Government say that they told the people that, if they came to power, the Bill would be passed, but they never put up one candidate. I understand that their party does not permit anybody to organise in Northern Ireland--yet the Government say what will be done. That is not what was done in Scotland or Wales, where the people were given a referendum and were permitted to say what they wanted.
When the Government see that the Unionists in this House together have one mind on this issue, they should pay a little heed to what Unionist leaders are saying. If the Government steamroller on, the sad thing is that it is not the Government but the ordinary people of Northern Ireland who will reap the consequence, with all the trouble and problems that that will bring. The people of Northern
Ireland will have to reap the whirlwind that comes from the sowing of the wind. The House should take note of that.
Northern Ireland is in an evil case because there has not been a frank and forthright facing up to those who intend to take it down an evil road. We have seen what the IRA is doing, and it has succeeded. Nobody is more happy that we are having this debate tonight than the IRA, and nobody is more happy that the Bill is going through. The Bill is a nursery of grievances. People wishing to demonstrate are given less time than the people who are to organise the parade, and they can do it.
Even if those involved do not give the 21-day notice, they have a way out. Is it not practical for them to say, after receiving 28 days' notice, that they are to protest? That is the law of the land, which will bring a reaping of tears. The Bill will not bring the peace and reconciliation that we are told it will bring. It will bring confusion and help the IRA with their dastardly work. We shall reap a sad harvest of this night's work. It has happened before in this House and it is happening again tonight.
Mr. William Ross:
The Minister started his speech on Third Reading by referring to recent murders in Northern Ireland, and the implication of his remarks was that the Bill would go some way toward resolving the difficulties that Northern Ireland experiences. The last time I heard that was when Mrs. Thatcher told us in 1985 that she had signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, because something had to be done to stop the violence. At that time, my wife wrote to Mrs. Thatcher and said that the blood of every man and woman who died from that day on would lie on her head, because she had sold out to the threat of violence. She would never have signed that deal had it not been for the IRA, its murders and its violence. We all knew that that was true and the end result is that there has been a lot of bloodshed from that day to this.
Tonight, the Minister stands and tells us that the Bill will stop the violence. The hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley) has been in the House longer than any of the rest of us from Northern Ireland and has said plainly that the Bill is a factory of grievances. I have heard that expression used in respect of Northern Ireland legislation before on many occasions, and every single time it has been used, events have proven it correct--the downstream consequences have proven that our words were absolutely accurate. However, it does not seem to matter how often we are right in this place; the Government, of whatever complexion, go on doing their own thing and the end result is more and more misery for those whom we represent.
The Minister may sit and chatter and laugh and think that he is going to have a wonderful time this coming summer. He referred to Drumcree, the Ormeau road and
Londonderry and the implication is that, by passing the legislation, all those things will be prevented in future. However, the only person who could draw that conclusion from the events of the past year or two is one who completely misunderstands what is going on in Northern Ireland.
The Government are accepting the Sinn Fein-IRA analysis, as they call it, of the situation, but that analysis is totally false. The real analysis is that Northern Ireland is suffering from an assault on its constitutional position by a terrorist organisation--a ruthless, violent and evil terrorist organisation. Despite the fact that Sinn Fein-IRA have had the same opportunity as anyone else to ask people to vote for them over a long period of time, they have never been able to convince other than a small fraction of the population of the rightness of their cause or of the merits of a united Ireland. Because they could not convince people, they turned to violence--it is as simple and as straightforward as that.
Faced with a terrorist organisation, one has a simple choice: one can defeat it or one can be defeated by it. This House has been constantly defeated by it for the past 30 years. It is from this House that the men, the material and, above all, the political will have to come to defeat that terrorism. That will has been sadly lacking throughout my period--and more than my period--in this place, and I have been here longer than most hon. Members present tonight.
Today we shall wind up with a Bill. Where do we go from here? We are told in amendment No. 27 that the Government want to
There was a mess in the group of amendments to which I have just referred, when even the Minister could not get his amendment right. Instead of a provision that reflected percentages of population and the number of commissioners, we ended up with a quorum of three, regardless of whether there are two, three, four, five or six members of the commission. That seems crazy. But there we are; that is the way it is.
We are told that the marchers, the people of Northern Ireland, must seek agreement with their neighbours. They will not have to seek agreement with ordinary, decent neighbours, however, because those neighbours are not causing any trouble. Instead of throwing stones, those people are getting on with their lives. However, marchers are told to do a deal with the IRA. Perhaps the Minister wants to deal with the IRA, and there are a hell of a lot of people in Northern Ireland who think that that is exactly what the Government are up to. I repeat: there are a hell of a lot of people in Northern Ireland who think that that is what the Government are up to. That is what colours the approach of many of us to this Government, given their behaviour in Northern Ireland.
I will not go much further than to say that some of us have the gravest suspicions about some of the things that happened under the previous Administration and the one before that. We cannot understand how anyone can be so blind to what is happening in Northern Ireland as successive Administrations have been in this place. Surely they must have been, and are, wilfully blind and wilfully unwilling to face facts.
"secure that as far as is practicable the membership of the Commission is representative of the community in Northern Ireland."
As has been said, people cannot be representatives of the community unless they live in it. It was not even possible to find a chairman who was representative of the community. It was necessary to appoint someone who had experience of settling industrial disputes in Great Britain, as if Northern Ireland was an industrial dispute rather than a terrorist war.
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