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Mr. Ingram: I can give the hon. Gentleman the assurance that he seeks--the assurance that was given to his right hon. Friend the Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble) in a letter from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.
Mr. Maginnis: I am grateful to the Minister. I was aware of that letter, but I wanted it to be put on the record.
I have never expected us to achieve all that we hope to achieve--to put right every wrong and every injustice that has occurred. How can we put right some of the injustices of the past 30 years? I believe, however, that we can at least impose such an obligation, and create such an atmosphere among the vast majority of people--with the support of the nation and the international community--that sooner or later we will achieve the ultimate objective. Gone are the days, I want to believe, when "Not a single rusty bullet" was what we heard in response to the requirement of our society that illegal weapons and illegal organisations should become a thing of the past.
12.38 am
Mr. Harry Barnes (North-East Derbyshire): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone (Mr. Maginnis), who made an important speech. Unusually, I wish that he had spoken for longer in the same vein. He often makes lengthy speeches when I think that he should be more succinct. The hon. Gentleman was clearly not being soft on the IRA, but wanted to use, extend and develop the current position to secure the objective that he had had all the time.
I appreciate that aspects of Unionism will involve reservations and concerns about the current situation. After all, decommissioning was supposed to have happened by about now--the complete disarmament
referred to by the hon. Gentleman. Instead of that, however, at the time by which that should have been achieved the re-establishment of the Executive is taking place. That is not to say that I am against the re-establishment of the Executive, but it was a demand made when the Executive was suspended, particularly by Sinn Fein. Therefore, in a sense Sinn Fein has got the Executive going at a time when complete decommissioning should have taken place.The other thing that must worry Unionists is that we are extending the order. They have been through that on many occasions in the past: we had direct rule after direct rule extended year by year. There is always something unsatisfactory about measures of that nature, but the order, like the suspension of the Executive, is something that I support entirely. Those measures seem to have been entirely essential in the circumstances that surrounded them. They were essential both for the peace process to take place and to go forward.
I disagreed with one aspect of what the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr. Öpik) said about what would happen if arms were finally put out of use. He believed that, to some extent, it was a symbolic move that had to take place. It is much more significant than that. Once numbers of arms are put beyond use and destroyed, the situation of the IRA will be entirely different.
It is not a matter of the IRA just going around and buying a few more guns to replace those weapons. It must be mobilised and organised to do that. How would it do it? Extra finances might need to be raised. Its members would be told to rob more banks. They would say, "What are you telling us to do? To rob more banks after you have just given the guns away, which now need to be replaced?" Therefore, I think that the move is of great practical significance. Getting to a situation where weapons begin to be out of use, to be controlled and to be contained is of significance to the whole psychology and attitude of the IRA.
Therefore, the IRA statement is of deep significance to that organisation. It is an admission that the arms struggle is to end. It should have gone further; it will need to do so. It will need to be pressed and pushed, but a big, significant change has taken place. We must grab hold of it and seek to develop it. We need the loyalist paramilitary organisations to follow that particular path quite quickly--to follow at least the proposals that the IRA is putting forward. We need them to begin to go beyond that and even to talk about disbanding. That is the logic of the IRA putting arms out of use.
If a paramilitary organisation does not have its arms to draw on, it is changed entirely. Will it change into something else, or will it disappear? It should disappear. Then, if people want to get into the political process, they will do so through their political wing--within Sinn Fein--hopefully acting entirely legitimately and democratically, or getting used to acting legitimately and democratically, with a sea change over time in their approach and attitudes.
The dynamic of the inspection will be quite important. The reports that will be produced, the pressure that that will put on the IRA and, generally, on the development of the political process, is very important. The whole future really depends on the reports that are being produced and on related developments. The process takes on board and develops the bread-and-butter issues that are
important in Northern Ireland politics, and it will be bedded in as long as we have the reports confirming that arms are beyond use.We are now within sight of fruition of the Belfast agreement--which is on track, despite the time-limit problems that I mentioned. However, we must always be alert to the fact that much more has to be done. We shall have to address the issues of intimidation, people being forced into exile and the need for the general disintegration of paramilitary activity, including the type of activity--in which it engages on estates--that can perhaps be characterised as IRA plc and from which it benefits financially very much.
There is also always the possibility of paramilitary splits. I hope that such splits will be made into ever smaller groups, over which the authorities can take control, and over which political control may be exercised by an Executive that is up and operating in Northern Ireland.
12.46 am
Mr. Peter Robinson (Belfast, East): There are not many words in the order that we are considering, but regardless of how much we scrutinise those words, we will not see in them the real reason why the order has been introduced. It has been introduced because of the folly of those who told us that the Belfast agreement had within it a requirement to decommission. Among those people were the leader of the Ulster Unionist party, the right hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble), and no less a person than the Prime Minister. Both of them told the House and the people of Northern Ireland that there was an absolute requirement for decommissioning and that things would not happen unless decommissioning occurred. However, those things did happen.
Prisoners were let out of jail, but no decommissioning occurred. Police were put on the altar for destruction, but no decommissioning occurred. All-Ireland bodies with executive power were established, but no decommissioning occurred. The representatives of unrepentant and armed terrorism got into government, but no decommissioning occurred.
The date specified in the Belfast agreement envisaged the completion of decommissioning. Now, we are talking about extending that date without even having seen the start of decommissioning. The order therefore represents the folly of those who were suckered by the IRA's representatives into believing that, in exchange for the concessions that they made, they were going to get something in return.
Today, we have already heard in the House of the willingness of that same group of people to be suckered yet again--to delude themselves into believing that what the IRA has said amounts to decommissioning. It does not. There is nothing in the IRA statement that meets the terms of decommissioning as stated in the Northern Ireland Arms Decommissioning Act 1997.
The 1997 Act required the destruction of weapons and--just as the Minister said--there are four ways of doing that. However, when he went further and gave an interpretation of that--that destruction includes making permanently inaccessible or permanently unusable--he should perhaps have paused a little longer at the word
"permanently", because it is absent from anything that is within the IRA statement. All it talks about is "putting beyond use"--but what does that mean? It is not interpreted in its statement. It has also not been interpreted by the representatives. However, people in this place feel themselves fit to interpret it as meaning decommissioning under the terms of the 1997 Act.We might have thought that, with all the sorry experience that they have had of being made fools of by the IRA, those people would hold their tongues a little longer before preaching to the people of Northern Ireland that what they are now being offered by the IRA is anything close to decommissioning. It is not. Once again, the IRA is trying to put the issue on the long finger and get back to government, still perpetuating the illusion that somewhere down the line we may get decommissioning. After all this time, I would have thought that the House would look more carefully at the Act that it passed.
The weapons will be permanently inaccessible, but to whom? Inaccessible to the IRA, one might have answered a few weeks ago, but under the IRA's statement, its members are the only ones who will have access to their arms--they will not be inaccessible to the terrorists. The statement also says that the weapons will be permanently unusable, but unusable by whom? By the IRA, one might have said, but the IRA's members will be the only people who will be able to use them, if they so choose.
The so-called confidence-building measure involves allowing two individuals approved by the IRA to inspect some of its arms dumps. The intelligence services say that there are more than 20 major arms dumps and hundreds of arms hides for the more operational weapons. It is envisaged that the IRA will allow people to look at three of them--not even necessarily the three largest. Are the logistics of that inspection to be given to the international body? They will certainly not be given to the security forces. The fact that three of the IRA's arms dumps will be inspected by two of its friends is supposed to be a great confidence-building measure that will assure the Unionist community that these people are genuine. The House can be certain that that is what the IRA envisages by putting its weapons beyond use.
The Government and those who negotiated the Belfast agreement can no longer dangle in front of the people of Northern Ireland their claims of what they would get in return for their votes, because the community no longer believes them. The people have been fooled once, but they will not be fooled again.
Before the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Mr. Öpik), talked about a stable situation, he might have thought of all those who are still victims of the weapons that the IRA claim it is going to put beyond use. The situation is far from stable. Mr. McGuinness--an army council member of the Provisional IRA and a leading Sinn Fein negotiator--tells us that he is prepared to allow those who carried out the most dastardly event in terrorist history in Northern Ireland to get away with their crime. He has said that he does not recommend those people to give the Royal Ulster Constabulary any information that they have. We are supposed to put our trust in this person, who is a leading member of the IRA army council. On the basis of those who have spoken, that is what the House is asking us to do. The people of Northern Ireland, particularly the Unionist community, will not tolerate their representatives
accepting the word of IRA terrorists as bona fide or regarding them as capable of keeping the promises that they interpret them to have made.The order would allow the Provisional IRA to string along the political process for a further year to get more concessions from the Government and from weak Unionists. I am glad that the overwhelming majority of the Unionist community in Northern Ireland is no longer suckered by the process or torn by those who invited them to embrace it.
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