Freedom of Information Act 2000

Lord Bew Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Hennessy for initiating this debate. My remarks will follow broadly in the spirit of his remarks and, like him, I have to declare an interest as a practising university historian, at Queen’s University Belfast, and as secretary of the All-Party Group on Archives and History.

There is an important Irish dimension to this question, relating to the decades of commemorations that are about to come upon us in Ireland: of the signing of the Ulster covenant, the Easter Rising and the war of independence. There are still important documents in Kew that have not been released in this context. I am interested because historians need to be armed. Quite rightly, there is a certain nervousness in both Governments about the emotional consequences of some of these commemorations. For some, they are a rather bad model—the argument is that the commemoration in 1966 of the Easter Rising played a role in triggering the subsequent Troubles. Historians need help, and we have formed an ad-hoc group of historians on a north-south basis, under the chairmanship of Professor Eunan O’Halpin of Trinity College, Dublin. We all feel that the more help that we get from Governments to release documents, the more valuable we can actually be.

I am not talking about spasmodic release. For example, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, the Irish Taoiseach, wrote to him and said, “Could we please have Roger Casement’s SIS files released?” and they were released. I am talking about something somewhat more systematic. There is one thing in particular that Her Majesty’s Government could do: they could get in touch with Commonwealth states—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—and say to them that they could safely declassify Irish material from the period 1913-23. We strongly suspect that it remains locked away because it contains security-related exchanges with London that no longer have any particularly poisonous dimension to them. I very much hope that the Minister, who has been a friend to historians, will help us in this matter.

However, I would like to add something slightly more cautious in the spirit of my noble friend Lord Wilson’s remarks about the move to a 20-year rule. I am certain that before long our political class will agree to this, and there is a reason for that. Even the great figures of our current political class, a Thatcher or a Blair, are at the top for only 10 or 11 years, so a 20-year rule is something that they can feel quite comfortable with. For good or for ill, there are no longer any Mr Gladstones, who sat in Peel’s Cabinet in the 1840s and was putting through the third Home Rule Bill in 1893. If we had politicians who spent 50 years at the top, I am certain that we would not be talking about a 20-year rule.

It is not politicians or their reputations that worry me; it is the young officials. I have talked to members of the committee that made this recommendation, I believe that it is the spirit of the times and I support it broadly. However, even under the 30-year rule young civil servants have been embarrassed by material that has been released. We need to be a little cautious about this matter.