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11.27 pm
The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Marjorie Mowlam): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
Mr. MacKay : I am pleased to hear the Secretary of State saying that she and her ministerial colleagues will listen very carefully to everything that is being said throughout these debates because we sincerely believe that the three sets of amendments, which would provide the proper failsafes that the Prime Minister promised the people of Northern Ireland, and this House from the Dispatch Box, should be part of the legislation.
I am at least heartened to learn that, on the ITN news at 11 o'clock tonight, the political editor Mr. Michael Brunson, presumably with the help of spin doctors from Downing street--apparently he was speaking from outside Downing street--said that the Government are now indicating that they will move on prisoner releases and will also take into account what my right hon. and hon. Friends and I have said. Whether that is true, I do not know. I hope that it is accurate.
Mr. Eddie McGrady (South Down):
Hon. Members have spoken with sincerity throughout all stages of our consideration of the Bill and that sincerity has been accepted by all those in the Chamber. The second common factor is that all of us, of whatever party, of whatever tradition and of whatever future we want to have together, do not want arms to remain in private hands.
The substance of the Bill is how, after so many decades and so many recent months of stress and turmoil, to reach the point where the decommissioning of weapons and explosives takes place. However imperfect the Bill may be in the eyes of many, at least it gives us a yardstick by
which, in the very near future, real measurement can be made of success. Alternatively, the failure to achieve decommissioning can be fully exposed.
Many have spoken tonight of the lack of trust between the parties in Northern Ireland. That is so, and that is understandable. Many have produced litanies of the deaths, murders and other terrible acts of violence. I remember when we passed a Northern Ireland Bill that in effect, said that, after 30 years of intense violence, we would not be able to switch off violence at midnight on a given day. There is a history of violence within people, and some of it will continue. However, we must not let violence that is organised, approved and authorised by paramilitary organisations continue.
Many members of those organisations will continue to engage in violence as a way of life in terms of drugs, extortion and intimidation, for example. That must not be confused with paramilitary violence aimed at destabilising the state. That is an entirely different concept. We as a society will suffer from the violence of individuals for many years to come. We will have to deal with it as a social issue. I do not want to have to deal with it as a paramilitary issue. That is what the Bill is about.
All but one of the Ulster Unionist parties, including the United Kingdom Unionist party and the Democratic Unionist party, are opposed not only to the Bill or to the amendments to it but to the entire concept of the Good Friday agreement. That is fair enough. That is what democracy is about. But democracy has also said--71 per cent. of the north and 93 per cent. of the south--that the Good Friday agreement is the way in which we want to go forward as communities in the north and the south living in harmony together.
There is distrust among us. The best way to test whether there is trust is to introduce a test, and we can do so within weeks. I will not argue whether that should be four weeks or six weeks in the context of our history, but we know that the test must take place within a short term when set against what we have suffered over 30 years and way beyond.
Mr. William Ross (East Londonderry):
The Government Whip told us a few minutes ago that we had considered the Bill. That stretched the imagination because, as the House knows, we have gone only through the motions. There is much in the Bill that has not yet been explored. There has not been time to go through it in the necessary detail. It has long been evident to anyone who lives in Northern Ireland and who knows the situation there that there is no peace at present. In the longer term, it has long been evident that the litmus test of whether the IRA would come in from the cold and be part of the democratic process was weapons. The question of weapons always had the potential--
Mr. Robert McCartney:
Illegal weapons.
Mr. Ross:
My hon. and learned Friend says "Illegal weapons", and that is what we are always talking about.
I have always believed that Sinn Fein-IRA are totally committed to turmoil and instability in Northern Ireland. They want to portray it as a failed political entity. They have made it clear that they do not want the Assembly. They want all-Ireland bodies.
The issue of weapons should not be discussed in the House today. It should have been resolved early in the negotiations, then we would have known where we were going. It is the subject of debate today because of the failure to deal with such a crucial element at the beginning of the process.
The Prime Minister told us that, if those people were kept out, there would be violence. He has not explained to anyone in Northern Ireland or the House how he will deal with violence if they must be put out next year or whenever--provided that they ever get in.
It was evident to those of us who have been in this place for some time that there was never the slightest possibility of the Government accepting any amendments. The Bill has already been agreed with Dublin, with the White House, with the Social Democratic and Labour party and, for all I know, with Mr. Adams. Consequently, there was no chance that it would be amended.
The hon. Member for South Down (Mr. McGrady) was present when his party leader spoke earlier. He was challenged on the question whether his party would put the gunmen out if they did not surrender weapons--a question that he has always failed to answer. Only one conclusion can be drawn.
The net effect of the Bill is simple. At present, the parties in the Assembly can exclude those who do not live up to the standards that they are supposed to accept. The combination of the Ulster Unionist party and the SDLP could always have kept Sinn Fein-IRA out of office. For that matter, a combination of the Unionist party and the Democratic Unionist party could keep them out for up to 12 months at a time, renewable under the provisions of the 1998 legislation.
The Bill shifts the onus to the Disarmament Commission report and to the Secretary of State, who then must act. Under the Bill, those people would be kept out for only a limited period--less than 12 months--after which time they could get back in again.
Dr. Palmer:
On Second Reading, we discussed in some detail the amendments proposed by the official Opposition and the Ulster Unionists. I said then that the difficulty seemed to be that the central issue of Northern Ireland peace was not weapons--the weapons are a symptom of the central issue, which is trust.
If the politicians in Northern Ireland, Britain and Ireland trust each other, the question of weapons will resolve itself. If they do not trust each other, they will need to be made to trust each other through the process, before anyone can feel safe. That is the reason why the assault from hon. Members who oppose the Good Friday agreement is so ambiguous, to put it politely. They say that they disagree with the agreement, yet they criticise the signatories to the agreement for not moving as rapidly as they had hoped.
Let us accept that, if any of us were asked to work together on the basis of threats of violence, we would have the greatest difficulty in doing so. That would be the case regardless of whether we had weapons, whether we had given them up, or whether we had promised to give them up. The threats and the atmosphere of violence are the basic problem of Northern Ireland.
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