| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Country Lanes and Villages
Mrs. Helen Brinton accordingly presented a Bill to enable traffic authorities to make provision in rural areas for the designation of highways where pedestrians, pedal cyclists and horse riders have priority on the carriageway over mechanically propelled vehicles for the purpose of improving safety and protecting the character of the countryside; to make provision for reduction of the national speed limit for certain rural roads; and for related purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 11 June, and to be printed [Bill 99].
Northern Ireland (Location of Victims' Remains) Bill
Sir Brian Mawhinney (North-West Cambridgeshire): Before clause 1 becomes part of the Bill, I wish to refer the Committee to subsection (4), which starts with the words, "Victim of violence", and continues with a definition of that term. It had been my intention to be here on Monday to take part in the Second Reading, but for reasons that I conveyed to Madam Speaker, I was unable to be present. However, I read the Minister's speech carefully and with some interest, and he referred repeatedly to "The Disappeared".
It is important, as we pass this nasty little Bill, that at least we are not taken in by our own rhetoric. It was, I believe, Lenin who used to say that the whole point of terrorism was to terrorise people. That was also a favourite phrase of Michael Collins. What we are talking about in the Bill is terrorising people--cold-blooded acts by people who set out to abduct, torture and kill, probably in the most unpleasant ways. They do so not just for the sake of killing, although that was part of the very nature of the IRA, but to terrorise not just families but communities. The Bill will allow some degree of excuse for that terrorism.
I understand the background to the Bill, and the Minister will know that when I held the post that he now holds I was the first Minister who started the peace talks that culminated 10 years later in the Good Friday agreement. He also knows that everything that I have said since the agreement has broadly been in support of the Government and what they seek to do, so we do not have to have a debate about whether I am in favour of the Government's objectives. I shall not sit quietly by, however, and allow the Bill to pass without helping people to understand that the Minister was so generous as to be unbelievable when he said on Second Reading that this is a humanitarian Bill. This is not a humanitarian Bill: it is a piece of cynicism, driven by the IRA, derived from a propaganda need to take some of the pressure off it at the time of the Hillsborough talks. The Bill is deplored by some of those at the heart of the benefit that may accrue from its passage.
We all know that after up to 30 years there are a number of families in Northern Ireland who still sorrow and grieve, and who have not had the opportunity to give to their loved ones the dignity of a proper, Christian burial. That instinct is very strong among hon. Members of all parties in this House, but the IRA does not begin to understand it.
This Bill is a nasty, cynical piece of manipulation which the Governments of Great Britain and of the Irish Republic have felt compelled to introduce to their
legislatures for reasons of the greater good. All hon. Members support the families and sympathise with them, but we must proceed honestly and recognise the Bill for what it is. Today, we are recognising the terrorism, awfulness and cynicism of an organisation that still exists to terrorise for its own purposes.
The Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office (Mr. Adam Ingram):
I well understand what the right hon. Gentleman has said about his past record and his on-going support as we go down the difficult road towards achieving our ultimate objective of a peaceful Northern Ireland. When he held my office, he had to take part in some difficult decisions. However, he said that this was a nasty little Bill. Does he hold the same opinion of the Northern Ireland Arms Decommissioning Act 1997, which he supported? That contained many of the same precepts that appear in this Bill. He said that the Bill is not a humanitarian measure, but how does he address the concerns of the families?
In my speech on Second Reading, which the right hon. Gentleman said that he read in detail, I did not talk about terrorism in any sympathetic way. He will know that I condemned unreservedly terrorism and the barbarism associated with the acts leading up to the disappearance of these people. I said that they were probably beaten and tortured, that they had had no right to a proper trial or to an appeal, and that their fundamental human rights had been taken away. I gave not an inch on that.
On 29 March, the Provisional IRA announced that it was prepared to provide information about some of the people who had been disappeared. The two Governments therefore had to act, or decide not to act. The right hon. Gentleman appears to be saying that we should not have acted, but instead should have put pressure on the Provisional IRA--in ways that he has not defined--and thereby somehow turn up the information that we are seeking to obtain on behalf of the families. However, the pressure exerted over 30 years did not bring one iota of comfort to some of the families involved.
Mr. Robert McCartney (North Down):
Will the Minister give way?
The difficulty and dilemma with which the Government were faced in dealing with the information from the Provisional IRA lay in how to put it into effect. The Provisional IRA's announcement contained no absolutes or guarantees that the information would be released.
On Second Reading, I asked the House a question to which I hope that the right hon. Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Sir B. Mawhinney) will give consideration. If not through this Bill, by what other means does the right hon. Gentleman expect the information to come from the Provisional IRA? We must think all the time of those families, and the trauma with which they have lived for 30 years. Those who argue against this Bill cast them aside and do them no service at all.
Sir Brian Mawhinney:
Better than most, I understand the dilemma that the Minister faces. I shall not vote against the clause standing part of the Bill: in these circumstances, as I have already said, the Government have to do what they have to do. However, I ask the
I ask that the Minister does not use the sort of language that might be used in other circumstances when there have been unavoidable tragedies. As I said earlier, the hearts of every hon. Member in the Chamber, irrespective of party, go out to the families.
I have had to announce enough bloody deaths in Northern Ireland to be sure that no one can accuse me of having no sensitivity for or sympathy with the bereaved. But I do not want the message to go to Northern Ireland that the House used the civilised language employed for normal tragedies to make rosy a determined and deliberate attempt to terrorise by using this sort of mechanism in the knowledge that the Minister's good instincts and those of the rest of the House would respond to it.
In Ulster terms, let us call a spade--
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Alan Haselhurst):
Order. May I remind the right hon. Gentleman that he was intervening, not making a second speech?
Mr. Ingram:
The right hon. Gentleman's intervention was worth while because of its length. He addressed several points that needed to be made, and we shall debate them now and on other parts of the Bill. I appreciate that the right hon. Gentleman is not opposing the Bill, merely highlighting its enormity and the difficulties associated with it. To those who do oppose the Bill, however, I have to ask a question: if not this Bill, what?
One of the jobs with which I am tasked is that of being the Minister for victims. On coming into Government, I was amazed to find out how blank the sheet was on that subject. That was true not only of the previous Administration, and I do not seek to overstress that point, by and large, of the wider community in Northern Ireland no one had begun to address the complexity, enormity and depth of trauma within that society. Many individuals--including politicians--used victims as political footballs. They were brought out when there was a point to be scored, but no one gave support, encouragement or hope.
It was largely left to voluntary organisations to provide that support, although many were supported by public money. No coherent way was developed for dealing with issues connected with victims. We have begun to address the problem, but have begun only to touch on its extent. The more we do, the more we shall expose the deep difficulties in Northern Ireland, and no one--certainly no politician--has all the answers to the problems.
My central point is that the Bill begins to address a fundamental problem, but it is not easy to do so. We have made no apology for the actions of terrorists and paramilitaries, and nothing in the language of my Second Reading speech could be deemed to have given any word of comfort to terrorists. No one who spoke in that debate gave a word of comfort to those who carried out the actions addressed by the Bill.
I hope that the message of that debate has been absorbed in the wider republican and loyalist communities that support the people of violence. Now is the time to stop and to search for new ways forward.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |