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Mr. Lidington: I am grateful to the Secretary of State.
Rev. Ian Paisley: I should like to bring the hon. Gentleman back to his point that people with connections to terrorism could not possibly be involved in certain matters relating to the police, the law and the courts. Would he go further and say that it would not be in the interests of Northern Ireland to have people in government in that part of the United Kingdom who were still connected to terrorists and to terrorist violence?
Mr. Lidington: Yes. I was about to make exactly that point. The Secretary of State referred to the events of last year—to the IRA statement announcing the end of its so-called armed struggle and to the act of decommissioning in September, which General de Chastelain reported involved a very large quantity of guns and explosives. Both those IRA actions were of major significance, and had they happened five or six years ago, when they should have happened—when democratic politicians from both traditions had every right to expect them to have been taken—they might have been of decisive importance in building trust. However, and in response to the right hon. Gentleman's point, it is not enough simply to take the events of last year as conclusive. They marked significant steps in the right direction, but we need evidence to convince us that the republican movement's commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means of attaining its political objectives is both permanent and irreversible.
The type of comment that police officers and others in Northern Ireland have made to me is that although matters have undoubtedly improved hugely on the security and policing front, they cannot yet be certain whether we have reached the definitive end of an IRA
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campaign that has been going on since at least the early 1920s, or whether it is another lull in that campaign, such as occurred in the 1950s.
Mr. Dodds: The hon. Gentleman's approach is absolutely right. Whether or not the IRA is on a permanent and irreversible path to peace, the crucial question for many people is whether its members are prepared to disband their military organisation. If they will not, does not that indicate that at some point they would be willing to reconsider the use of violence?
Mr. Lidington: At one stage, Ministers in the Irish Government called on the IRA to disband—the Justice Minister did so recently. I agree that an announcement about disbanding would probably send a more powerful signal to the Unionist community and to democratic nationalists in Northern Ireland than any other single gesture. Instead, too much of the debate about the future devolution of policing has centred on whether, and if so when, Sinn Fein will take up its seats on both the Policing Board and district policing partnerships. Taking seats risks being an empty gesture unless it is a clear demonstration that republicans will henceforward support the PSNI as an institution and work for its success.
Ideology is important. We cannot have on the Policing Board members of a political party that will not accept either the police or the courts as legitimate, but instead looks to the army council of the Provisional IRA as the supposed source of legitimate authority not just in the north but throughout the entire island of Ireland.
Mr. Andrew Turner: I agree with every word that my hon. Friend says, but does he agree that although stated ideology is important, what is most important is practical, on-the-ground peace, which includes peace from punishment beatings and assaults, as well as from assaults and the threat of assaults on peaceful marches?
Mr. Lidington: My hon. Friend is right. Ideology is important because we are talking about an organisation that takes pride in asserting that it acts in accordance with a consistent ideological position, and a visible shift in ideology would have a very important symbolic impact on republicanism's own followers. However, my hon. Friend is right to say that that ideological change needs to have clear practical expression. That should not only be in the form of a cessation of punishment beatings, or paramilitary assaults, as they are more properly described; it means the cessation of involvement in criminality of all types.
Let us hear Sinn Fein members urge those of their supporters who witnessed the murder of Robert McCartney to go to the police with their evidence. Let us see republicans working with the police and the other agencies of law and order to make restorative justice a reality of the kind that we have seen elsewhere in the United Kingdom, rather than trying to operate community restorative justice organisations as a private judicial system and an instrument of intimidation and social control. Let us hear Sinn Fein's leaders saying openly that young men and women who believe passionately and honestly in a united Ireland can still find a worthy career in the police service, and that there
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is no contradiction in having that democratic political objective and having a clear civic duty to pursue criminals and enforce the law with rigour.
I hope that we can in due course look to the implementation of these clauses on the devolution of policing and criminal justice, but we still have quite a long way to go politically before that becomes a practical possibility.
I want briefly to touch on three of the other subjects included in the Bill, the first of which is electoral registration. I was concerned by the original Government proposal in the consultation paper to extend the deadline for electoral registration to just 11 days before the poll, and I noted the concerns of the chief electoral officer that such a tight deadline would make it difficult to carry out the checks that would be needed under the Northern Ireland system and might add to the risk of fraud. I therefore welcome the fact that the Government have now decided to introduce safeguards in response to those concerns. We will want to explore the adequacy of those safeguards in Committee.
That leads me to comment that the rigour not just of those safeguards but of the entire system for electoral registration and, indeed, the other changes in the Bill, such as doing away with the statutory annual canvass, depends critically on the integrity, authority and independence of the chief electoral officer. I have met the current office holder and was impressed by what he told me about how electoral registration is carried out in Northern Ireland. In the light of the importance of that office for the integrity of the entire registration system, I confess to being somewhat uneasy about the fact that the Bill makes the chief electoral officer's reappointment after five years subject to renewal by the Government, whereas at the moment, I understand, he is appointed indefinitely, subject only to good behaviour.
I am certainly not casting any adverse imputations at the Secretary of State or any of his Ministers if I say that I am uneasy about the prospect of any politician from any political party having it in his power to decide whether the chief electoral officer should or should not be reappointed after five years. One could see how the chief electoral officer might be subjected to a certain amount of political pressure in how he exercised his judgment because he would want to make sure that he got a second term in the job.
I cannot leave the subject of electoral registration, however, without expressing some regret—to take up a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner)—that the Government are allowing a different system in Northern Ireland from that in the rest of the United Kingdom, or, more properly, that they are not applying the system of individual registration that is successfully guarding against fraud in Northern Ireland to the rest of the country. I am sorry that the Secretary of State was unable to persuade his Cabinet colleagues to benefit from the experience of Northern Ireland, and particularly sad that he was unable to persuade the Secretary of State for Wales to go down that route, and I still hope that, some day soon, the Government may understand that the Northern Ireland example is the one that England, Wales and Scotland should follow.
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On the funding of political parties, my preference and that of my party is for Northern Ireland to be brought as soon as possible fully within the same system of checks and scrutiny as applies to any other part of the United Kingdom under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. We have accepted reluctantly that the fear of intimidation in Northern Ireland makes that final move impossible for now, and I support the Bill's compromise on the reporting of donations in confidence to the Electoral Commission.
The Bill touches on a further issue to do with party donations. The fact that a large minority of people in Northern Ireland consider themselves to be Irish in terms of both nationality and citizenship clearly has implications for party donations, but we will want to look very closely, in Committee and on Report, at exactly how the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic arrangements for party donations will intersect in the legislation. During the Bill's future stages, we will want some further information about exactly how the Irish Republic defines both Irish citizenship and Irish companies for the purposes of party donations. We will want to be certain that the system of checks that we provide for Northern Ireland is suitably rigorous.
I wish to say a few words about the proposals for a single energy market. Whenever I talk to those in business or to business representative organisations in Northern Ireland, it soon becomes apparent that they are very clear that they now operate simultaneously in a Northern Ireland market, an island of Ireland market, a United Kingdom market, a British isles market, a European Union market and, indeed, in many cases, a global market. If the proposal for an island of Ireland wholesale energy market involves lower prices and greater choice for energy consumers in Northern Ireland—there might be a particular advantage for business consumers of energy—it should be supported. It strikes me as a sensible step in practical co-operation across the United Kingdom-Republic of Ireland border.
This country and the Republic of Ireland should have the same close, interdependent economic relationships as now exist between any other two neighbours in western Europe and, increasingly now, in central and eastern Europe. I hope that, in due course, we will not rule out integrating that all-Ireland market with the energy market in Great Britain or, for that matter, its inclusion in what I hope will eventually become a genuinely liberal energy market throughout the European Union.
We welcome many of the proposals in the Bill. We shall not seek to divide the House on Second Reading tonight, but we will want to explore and test the Government's arguments on certain aspects in Committee and on Report, and I invite my hon. Friends to respond to the Bill on that basis.
5.39 pm
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