Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill

Lord Bew Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure immediately to follow the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. His speeches in this House reflect not only his love for the Province but his grasp of the political detail, the complexity and the history of the Province. He, at least, will not shirk the tremendous difficulty that Keats noted in improving the condition of these people.

Batting at number 10, I will make some brief remarks about the Bill, and I start by thanking the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and her officials for the helpful briefing last Thursday on the different elements of the Bill. I should also indicate that I welcome the broad thrust of the Bill.

I accept the point of the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Belmont, that the culture in the political parties of Northern Ireland is changing, and that double-jobbing is gradually curing itself and moving out of the system. I still welcome the provisions in the Bill to give a certain finality to that. It is worth recalling that there was a substantial struggle on this point. As the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, said, the Committee on Standards in Public Life and its previous chairman, Sir Christopher Kelly, played a major role, as the Library’s briefing note makes clear, in entrenching judgments and moving opinion towards the conclusion which we now have in the Bill. I pay tribute to that work this evening; we should not forget it. The Committee on Standards in Public Life—I declare an interest in that I am its newly appointed chairman—also pushed very strongly on another key element in the Bill, which is greater transparency in the area of political donations.

Because we have been absorbing some difficult news from the OECD today, it might be worth while drawing attention to the fact that in mid-November the OECD held a conference in Paris under the heading of “Restoring Trust in Government”. One of the features of that conference was an acknowledgement that the United Kingdom had a good record in the matter of transparency as regards political donations. One blot on the United Kingdom’s record is the problem with respect to Northern Ireland that has already been alluded to by the noble Lords, Lord Empey and Lord Browne. However, the United Kingdom generally has a good record of transparency, and there is no question but that the Bill, in some of its provisions, reduces some of the criticisms that can be made as regards part of the Northern Irish tale which reduces the overall record.

None the less, it is a fundamental fact that a key principle of our law in the United Kingdom is the notion that it is inappropriate to have foreign donations working in our domestic politics. That is increasingly widely accepted and is a key principle of our law. The difficulty, which has been the case for some years and remains so under the Bill, is the continuation of the arrangements that allow Irish citizens to contribute to Northern Irish political parties. I fully accept that there is a special relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and that the need to make provisions for Irish citizens who live on the island of Ireland to play that role is implicit in the Belfast agreement itself. That agreement conferred new rights on those who consider themselves British, those who consider themselves Irish and those who consider themselves both; it did not confer new rights on those who consider themselves Irish or American or both. However, we are effectively doing that by continuing with those arrangements.

When the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was the Minister responsible for these matters, he was very open in Grand Committee in acknowledging that there are a lot of Irish citizens around the world. The point is that the Irish state has an expanded extraterritorial definition of citizenship. We are locked in by those arrangements to the Irish state’s constitutional view of those matters. As a consequence, there is indisputably a contradiction between our broad approach to the question of foreign donations and what we are permitted in this particular case. There is a difficulty here.

One of the things that slightly surprise me is that, after all, in recent times we have heard a great deal about the very good relationship between the two Governments and how it has never been better. We—or those who pay attention to Dublin politics—also hear an unease about the money that arrives in Dublin politics; I am talking now purely about politics between the Irish Republic and America. There is growing unease on those points. One of the questions that I want to ask the Government is: are serious discussions going on about the implications of those matters? Is there a sense that both Governments have an interest in at least looking more closely at current arrangements? There are some very striking recent newspaper reports about fundraising developments in the United States and very striking unease in the Dublin newspapers about it. As I say, we are stuck with the capacious definition of Irish citizenship currently available in the Irish constitution. Finally, in the same context, perhaps I may ask the noble Baroness if she can explain whether the new guidelines from the Standards in Public Office Commission in Dublin which came out in 2013 offer any real comfort to those of us who are concerned about that matter.