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Mr. Mallon: I wish to make it clear for the umpteenth time, first, that I did resign; secondly, that I never said that I did otherwise; and thirdly, that I stand by everything I did, because I did it for a reason and I am pleased to say it was successful.
Rev. Ian Paisley: I never said that the hon. Gentleman did not resign, and he knows that. It was a resignation, but the point is that people cannot say, "This is the agreement", and then, when it no longer suits them, say, "This is not the agreement." The agreement has not been abided by: it has been departed from.
The matter before the House is serious, because upon it depends the peace and quiet of the minds and hearts of the people of Northern Ireland. They know that the IRA have the best weapons of any terrorists in the western world. The House knows what the IRA did at Canary Wharf. The records in the Library show how much compensation was paid after that bomb. It is nearly as much as the total compensation paid out in the whole of Northern Ireland in all the years of violence. Some people in Northern Ireland say that the trouble is that the Government are afraid of the IRA starting up again in this part of the United Kingdom. The Government are being bullied and blackmailed by that threat.
All I can say is that there is no way forward in the agreement as it stands, but if we are to have a review I want to know what sort of a review it will be. Will we have a narrow review or a proper review? Who will participate in the review--the Members of the Assembly or the members of parties who have representatives in this House or in the Assembly? Who will sit at the table? Who will advise as to what should happen as a result of the review? Who will preside at the meetings?
I have been at every conference but one that the British Government have ever convened on the issue, and we have discovered that the two Governments seem to think that they are there to push elected representatives in the direction they want them to go. We have all to go back to the electorate, and if the Governments want to carry the country, they must carry the representatives who have their people behind them. People cannot be pushed down an undemocratic path.
I saw the writing on the wall written by the Prime Minister, who told us that there would be no men in the Executive who belonged to lawless organisations. He told us that decommissioning would start and that no one would be let out of prison until it did. That is what people voted for in the referendum, but it did not happen. The people voted on promises, and they now say no. I have met hundreds of people who have told me that they voted yes, but that they would vote no today.
Mr. John M. Taylor (Solihull):
Not for the first time, I find myself at the Dispatch Box when little more needs to be said and, frankly, there is little time in which to say it. Equally, not for the first time, I find myself particularly impressed with the remarks of the hon. Member for Newry and Armagh (Mr. Mallon).
The question has been put to me: what does it matter if they have guns, ammunition and explosives if they do not use them? That is a seductive, but shallow, question. It could be rephrased, "Is it okay if one half of the political process agrees to observe the law and the other half does not?" Adopting the idiom of the geometers of classical times--that is, reductio ad absurdum, or taking an argument to the limits of absurdity--how would it be if we acquiesced in the proposition that Conservative Members could be armed with guns, ammunition and explosives but the Labour Government could not, and the Government said, "That's okay; they haven't used them much recently." We would not fail to recognise that absurdity.
It is the same question in Northern Ireland. Antrim, Armagh, Down, Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone are as much part of the United Kingdom as Warwickshire, Yorkshire, Aberdeenshire, Powys or Devon. Although Northern Ireland is historically and culturally different, the fact is that we do not allow armed people to participate in the running of our affairs in this kingdom, nor should we.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Mr. George Howarth):
I should like to respond to one of the points made by the hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley) in response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn). The hon. Gentleman accurately pointed out that, in the previous European elections in Northern Ireland, he topped the poll. He went on, rather modestly, to equate his position in the poll on that occasion with the position that he takes on the Good Friday agreement. It was a big vote, but it was a big vote for a big character, and did not necessarily reflect overall agreement for the hon. Gentleman's position. Events will prove me right or they will prove him right, but I think that he was unduly modest about his position in the poll.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield approaches many issues from the position of a democrat. I appreciate that he has a long record as a parliamentarian of viewing issues through the eyes of a democrat. That is perfectly reasonable; in fact, it is a very principled position. He went on to talk about how the Good Friday agreement, the elections to the Assembly and so on, were sacrosanct because of democratic considerations, and that, if anything was to be changed it should, de facto, be done by an election. However, my right hon. Friend overlooked the fact that all the arrangements--the Executive, the north-south bodies, the Assembly itself as well as decommissioning and many of the other issues that form part of the Good Friday agreement--are interlocking. They are interdependent. It is in some respects like a house of cards, although rather more robust. Take away one and the rest no longer make any sense and collapse. There are those who would like to see it collapse, but I do not think that my right hon. Friend is one. However, he needs to understand that the issues are interlocking and interdependent. Therefore, it is not enough to view the Assembly as a body that can be sustained only by further democratic endorsement. That is an over-simplification of the arrangements.
Mr. John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington):
If we are relying on the Belfast agreement as part of the process of interlocking authority, what authority is in the Belfast agreement for the suspension of the Assembly? There is none.
Mr. Howarth:
I will cover that point in my due course, and no doubt my hon. Friend will listen with care.
The right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major), in a speech that was full of wisdom and insight, was right to say that this was a Bill that most of us in the House, whether Government or Opposition Members, and the majority of people in Ireland, both north and south, hoped would never be needed. It is, however, the only way of sustaining the potential of devolution. The situation has, in the past few weeks, started to blossom into a real and meaningful political project, one that is uniquely suited to the conditions and history of events in Northern Ireland.
It serves no purpose to debate the actual decommissioning obligations under the Good Friday agreement or, for that matter, any comments that may have come out of Senator Mitchell's review. The truth is, as the right hon. Members for Bracknell (Mr. MacKay) and for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble), among others, have rightly said, decommissioning, trust and devolution go hand in hand. For one section of the community, trust is inevitably linked not only to the silence of the guns but to their absence.
Given the continuing difficulties in achieving progress on decommissioning, there are three options, as we see it. First, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield suggested, we could have stood to one side and allowed the Assembly and Executive to collapse. For, as sure as night follows day, we would have reached that position sooner rather than later. The second option would have been, by some means, to enable the exclusion of those parties which were considered to be in breach of, or in default of, the obligations to decommission. I do not think that that would have worked either. My hon. Friend the Member for Newry and Armagh (Mr. Mallon) explained eloquently why many delicate relationships exist in the Good Friday agreement and the arrangements that followed it.
That leaves us with the final option--to suspend. We hope that that will lead eventually--sooner rather than later--to progress on decommissioning. By extension, it will enable the political process that is under way to start again. This last option, as my right hon. Friend said, leaves all the parties in a position in which the issues can be debated. There will be a review process and, once the two Governments decide what form that should take, we can then get on with it.
Given that we, our close colleagues in the Irish Government, the pro-agreement parties and most of the Members of this House, remain of the view that the Good Friday agreement is the best way of making progress, any option other than suspension--we all hope that it will be a temporary suspension--would have been counter to the spirit of the agreement. No one is arguing that it was pre-figured in some way in the agreement. That is not the case. This is the best way that we can find to preserve the spirit of the Good Friday agreement. We did not want the Bill, but it represents the best available option.
I hope that the House will send a clear signal tonight that the Good Friday agreement is still in place. Overwhelmingly, we want it to work. On the Government's behalf, I thank both the official Opposition and the Liberal Democrats for making it clear that they support us, and I praise all those parties in Northern Ireland who have taken their courage in their hands to move forward on implementing the agreement.
The agreement remains in place, and we all--nearly all--want it to work. Giving discretion--indeed, power--to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State demonstrates our support for the agreement. The most important thing that the House can do tonight is to show, by giving my right hon. Friend that power, that we still believe that the Good Friday agreement can be made to work. During the period of suspension, if it happens--we hope that it will not--there will be an opportunity for those who must take action to take that action. Only then can we achieve agreement and get the institutions back on track. That is what the people of Northern Ireland want.
I attended an event recently with the right hon. Member for Upper Bann and others--
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