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Mr. Tony Benn: Is the right hon. Gentleman recommending to the House that the preferred option of his party is to go back to the old Stormont rule, before the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath) suspended it and introduced direct rule?
Mr. Trimble: The right hon. Gentleman makes a mistake: Stormont was also devolution. If we are to go back to before devolution, we must go back to pre-1920, when Northern Ireland was treated in the House in exactly the same way as England, Wales and Scotland, as of course it ought to be. As a democrat, he would support a situation in which all citizens of the United Kingdom are treated equally. That is the only democratic course.
There are of course times when the exigencies of the situation mean that we have to agree on and operate procedures that are less than ideal, and we hope that this return to a less-than-ideal system will be limited. I referred to first-best, second-best and third-best options, and to avoid any doubt that the right hon. Gentleman might have, I make it clear that direct rule is the third-best option and treating Northern Ireland properly is the second best. The best of all is to see devolution succeed within the United Kingdom, and that is what we tried to do through the Belfast agreement and its implementation.
Mr. William Thompson (West Tyrone):
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the process of returning to direct rule, as set out in the Bill, will again make citizens of Northern Ireland second-class citizens within the United Kingdom? In addition, it actively encourages those who wish to take Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom to believe that Britain is not terribly committed to the Union and that they should keep going because eventually they will succeed.
Mr. Trimble:
If my hon. Friend will allow me, I would prefer to describe the situation by saying that direct rule is inefficient and unresponsive to the interests and wishes of those who are being ruled. That has been clearly established by the way in which direct rule operated, and it is likely to be the case in future. We all hope that the interruption of devolution is temporary, but we must all be conscious of the fact that we are returning to the third-best option.
I remind the Secretary of State of the remarks that he made in Victoria college in November, when he said that, during any period of suspension, he would like to see what he could do to keep alive the spirit of devolution
and to maintain some degree of political continuity between the devolution that we enjoy at present and that which we hope that we will enjoy again in the not-too-distant future.
In the meantime, while we are suspending the operation of devolution, it is right, as other hon. Members have said, to suspend other aspects of the agreement. As the Secretary of State knows, the suspension must apply not only to the Assembly, but to the associated North-South Ministerial Council and British-Irish Council.
The suspension ought also, however, to relate to matters such as prisoner release and the Patten report. The Secretary of State knows that confidence in Northern Ireland was tremendously damaged by the Patten commission's ill-judged report on certain matters. People in Northern Ireland, particularly those whom I represent, will find it incomprehensible if the default by the republicans is glossed over and radical, deeply wounding changes to appease them continue to be introduced as if nothing has happened. I say to the Secretary of State that people will find inaction on that front and failure to suspend incomprehensible. He needs to think seriously about that in the coming weeks and months.
Hon. Members and others outside should make no mistake about our objective. While we consider it necessary to suspend the operation of the institutions and other aspects of the agreement, it is not our intention in any way to depart from the substance of that agreement. Indeed, we are acting in this way in order to preserve it, because failure so to act will lead to the entire agreement unravelling. The only way to ensure that the agreement is implemented in its entirety and its integrity is to take the present action.
If we proceed now to a review, my objective, and that of the Ulster Unionist party, will be to work for the restoration of devolution and the Executive on a sound basis, and that means resolving the present difficulty. That will be the objective towards which we shall work. In determining whether we can restore devolution on a sound basis, I and my colleagues will exercise our own judgment.
Just as we asked the Ulster Unionist council for approval before jumping first in November, we are asking the Ulster Unionist council to consider the situation and give its view on the matters on Saturday. Although I will not anticipate what the council may say and do on Saturday, it would be reasonable for it to say that, in the event of any move back to devolution, it will exercise its judgment on that as well.
People should not regard the present situation as a crisis. It is a difficulty. They should regard it not as the end of the hopes that the agreement engendered, but just as a problem that we will work through. It is important that we retain confidence in our ability to work through the problem. We should retain confidence that the hopes contained in the agreement will be fully realised.
I was heartened by words that I read in the Irish News this morning. I do not often refer to that paper with approval, but I do on this occasion. Beside the editorial, it had printed some words from Seamus Heaney, who wrote:
Mr. Seamus Mallon (Newry and Armagh):
I want to begin where the right hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble) left off. In its definition of peace, that quotation from Seamus Heaney owes something to Spinoza, but I would go a little further. Peace is not just the absence of war. It is an attitude of mind--a disposition towards benevolence, confidence and justice. Those three factors are worth remembering when we are seeking a definition of peace.
I am tempted to give my own definition of peace. It would be much less poetic and much less philosophical. It would be very basic: it would refer to the fact that we have been able to wake up each morning without having to listen to the bad news about who was killed the night before, how many were killed and where they were killed. That is my simple definition of peace.
I was impressed when the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) asked us to do something that we seldom do: to try to get into the minds of other people. It is a worthwhile exercise, and I should like briefly to continue it. It is dangerous to ask rhetorical questions, but I want to pose one because I should like to gain an insight into people's minds. If there was not a Unionist party meeting scheduled for this weekend, and if resignation letters had not been written with that in mind, would the Bill be before the House now? I do not expect an answer, but I anticipate that most people who assess the question honestly will realise that, without those circumstances, we would not be considering the Bill, irrespective of the strong views in all parts of the House on decommissioning. That is the nub of the problem. I shall speak against suspension, despite the fact that I want decommissioning; indeed, I want it to happen as much as, and perhaps more than, other people.
I have been an elected politician in South Armagh for 30 years. I know at first hand the effects of guns and bombs, and the difficulties that such problems cause. I also have experience, going back 30 years, of suspensions. I was a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly that was "put on hold"--or, if one prefers not to use the euphemism, suspended. It was suspended on the understanding that it could be resumed. It was resumed; it took a quarter of a century to do it. We should all bear in mind the fact that suspension or putting on hold do not guarantee a speedy resolution of the problem.
I oppose suspension because things are different now. The institutions are beginning to work. Let me give an anecdote to illustrate that. I stood at a window in Stormont last week and watched droves of farmers driving up to the building for a mass meeting to lobby the Executive about agriculture and the problems of agriculture. Twenty-six years ago, a similar mass lobby took place--with some of the same people and even some of the same tractors and
lorries: except that those people came then to topple the devolution that existed. The two lobbies encapsulate the change that has occurred.
For good or ill, we are dicing with those changes. I do not want to pre-empt anything, but the mental image of those farmers, many of them the same people who participated in the last lobby, and of the change that has taken place, makes me wonder whether the arguments for suspension are sustainable.
Mr. Thompson:
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman remembers that there was a similar farmers' demonstration to Stormont 25 years ago. Different sections of the community spoke to them then.
"There is a cynical definition of peace which says it is merely the suspension of war.
8 Feb 2000 : Column 154
It is the cynics who have used that distortion of peace and who are frustrating the development of the creative condition to which Mr. Heaney refers. It is our intention to try to develop that creative condition as well and as fast as we can.
One of the paradoxical blessings of the past two-and-a-half decades of Northern Ireland's history has been an emergent vision of peace as a creative condition in which cultural, political and doctrinal differences can be actively confessed and intelligently contested."
5.48 pm
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