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Mr. Ingram: May I make this point?
Mr. Maginnis: I am standing up.
Mr. Ingram: I know that the hon. Gentleman is standing up, but I am not giving way.
Mr. Maginnis: You do not want to hear the truth.
Mr. Ingram: As I said to the hon. Gentleman on Second Reading, bullying and shouting might be his way forward, but it is not the way in which we try to address the issue.
The hon. Member for Belfast, South (Rev. Martin Smyth) mentioned his hon. Friend the Member for Lagan Valley (Mr. Donaldson). I accept that their party has now put forward a group to deal with the issue, for which I am very grateful. It is important that I have points of contact with political parties. That was not the point that I was making. I did not say that there was not anything now, but that when there was a need for something to exist, it did not. Now we are beginning to address the issue. Northern Ireland Members should not accuse the Government of standing back and doing nothing when we have been trying to initiate movement.
The hon. and learned Member for North Down (Mr. McCartney) mentioned his engagement with FAIR. Of course, he is not the only Member who has dealings with that organisation. The Secretary of State has met FAIR twice. I have offered to meet representatives of it since, but they have declined because, as I understand it, they are keen to meet the Prime Minister. That is a matter for them. Meetings with representatives of FAIR have not taken place not because the Government have not been prepared to meet them. The Secretary of State has met the organisation twice, and my offer remains open.
I hope that I have dealt with all the points raised in the debate. I did not anticipate such a long debate on clause stand part, but it is good that some hon. Members have now engaged in the process of debate; they may benefit from that engagement during the rest of the Bill's consideration.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 1 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Mr. William Ross (East Londonderry):
I beg to move amendment No. 11, in page 2, line 30, leave out from "effect" to end of line 34 and insert "on 30th September 1999".
The amendment deserves a fair amount of consideration in light of what the Under-Secretary said in his winding-up speech on Monday night. It is intended to time-limit the life of the Bill's provisions. He said on Monday night that the Government were not all that anxious to do that, but I believe that a time provision is embodied in the words that the amendment seeks to remove. The full subsection reads:
It seems to me that, as the Bill stands, it could endure for years. It could sit on the statute book until people had forgotten its existence. It could be there for 100 years before a Secretary of State decided to sweep it away. I therefore believe that it should be time-limited, to a precise date.
On Monday night, the Under-Secretary said:
I believe that, by leaving the Bill in its present condition, we are leaving the door open to the IRA to twist and turn, and to seek publicity time after time. We are leaving the IRA absolutely free to manipulate--we know how good it is at manipulation--the whole
community. We should not give the IRA that freedom of action. We need a clear cut-off date to stop its nonsense in its tracks. If members of the IRA really want to help, all the information that they have as to the remains of those nine people, and possibly others, can be provided by the end of September.
In my view, I have been more than generous. The Minister knows that I do not like the Bill. I believe that it is an abomination and should never have been produced because it undermines the rule of law. As everyone else in this place should be, I am familiar with the old saying, "Hard cases make bad law"; the Bill is a classic illustration of the truth of that. There are hard cases here. As I said on Monday night, people's emotions and religious practices are involved. In going down that road, we have made a grave error of judgment. If members of the IRA really want to help, they can.
We must realise that some of the people who carried out these atrocious crimes are probably dead and buried. They carried their secrets to the grave with them, so there is no chance whatever of recovering the remains of some of the people buried. In other cases, the people who went out and buried the bodies do not know where they are buried. They have forgotten. Many of the bodies were disposed of in the middle of the night. Some, we are told, were destroyed in the most horrific manner.
All those rumours circulate in Northern Ireland. It matters not which rumours are true and which are not. We can be certain that some bodies are not retrievable. It is likely that some are under road works or buried in the face of a tip of a road embankment and covered over the next day. No one can be sure where such a body may be; it could be anywhere along half a mile of road. We are not going to dig up a road in order to find it.
There could be bodies under major buildings. Some could be under the Waterfront hall, for all we know. There is no way of finding them. They could be under other building sites. They could be buried in open mountain, in bogs or in any one of a thousand places. The folk who put them there cannot recall where they put them in the dark of night and in their excitement and concern to get rid of them as quickly as possible. Someone carrying a mutilated body around the countryside does not want to run into a bunch of soldiers or policemen.
The people concerned got rid of the bodies as swiftly as they could. A body may have been buried in the bottom of an open grave in a cemetery somewhere, and a coffin placed on top of it the next day. No one knows where the bodies are, but representatives of the IRA, out of the goodness of their little murderous hearts, have kindly told the Government that they know where nine bodies are. The amendment is intended to ensure that the IRA gives up that information within a short time. It ties the IRA down, which is the one thing that that terrorist organisation does not want. It leaves the IRA no room to come back seeking concessions. If the Bill is left as it is, the IRA will be back for further concessions. Anyone who has anything to do with Northern Ireland knows that those people do not go away. They look for all the room that they can get, and there is far too much room left. Let us pin them into a corner and, if they are genuine, they will come forward with the information.
I fear that the IRA has no real intention of giving up the bodies. The whole thing is largely, if not wholly, a cruel deception. If the IRA is indeed involved in a cruel deception, the sooner we expose the nature of the people with whom we are dealing, the better. If all the known bodies can be produced, let us have them within the next few weeks. With regard to those that are irretrievable, as some probably are, we will have to be clear that no progress can be made.
"This section shall cease to have effect at the end of such day as the Secretary of State, after consulting the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform of the Government of Ireland, may by order made by statutory instrument appoint; and an order under this subsection may include such transitional provisions as appear to the Secretary of State to be expedient."
Therefore the Government at least envisage that, at some point in time, they would by order annul the Bill, and it would be swept away.
"By way of intervention, the hon. Member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone"--
my honourable colleague, who has been speaking--
"asked about time-limiting the Bill. The Government are not keen to close the door to the provision of information about 'The Disappeared' either from the IRA or any other organisation. The hon. Gentleman knows that the IRA produced a list of nine names at the end of March. Some people--such as the individual who came to the Palace of Westminster today--have expressed dismay that their relatives' names were not on the list. The families of those who were not on the list hope that, in time, details of the location of their loved ones' remains will be provided. That is why we are not time-limiting the Bill."--[Official Report, 10 May 1999; Vol. 331, c. 80.]
If that is the Government's reason, it is a mighty poor one.
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