Northern Ireland: Haass Talks

Lord Bew Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for securing this important debate. He has always been a great friend to Northern Ireland. I regret that what I have to say will be relatively cautious in the context of so many earlier eloquent speeches. I hope it will not appear negative but I think it is important to register certain points.

One concern is the cost of the Haass proposals. I fully support the Treasury’s decision to make the loan of £110 million and to ease the immediate crisis in the Executive. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, has said, in the context of strict repayment conditions it is very difficult for Northern Ireland to take on board new commitment to public expenditure. If it is true that the Haass proposals amounted to hundreds of millions, that has to be something that we consider carefully. I ask the Minister to give us some help on exactly how costly they might have been. Also, Dr Haass’s proposal outwith the talks when he accepted the Tipperary peace prize for making the Irish language a second official language cannot be, whatever its other merits or demerits, a cost-free proposal.

The other crucial point I want to make is that I have come—I regret to say this because I feel the needs of the victims so strongly and it is such a disappointing thing to say, particularly for those young scholars who want to participate in this process—increasingly to the view that the idea of a shared process of recovery from the past is not a very likely project. It was one I used to strongly and until recently believe in. I have not given up on it completely but I am increasingly sceptical. The unionist community basically believes that the state is responsible for only 10% of deaths, loyalist paramilitaries for 30% and republicans for 60%. They therefore believe that any narrative must reflect the fact that the lion’s share of the killing was carried out by republicans. It is quite straightforward: that is their view of the matter and that is what they want to hear. The republican community, on the other hand, with the support of a large cast of journalists, clerics and NGOs, focuses on broader explanatory factors which emphasise long-term structural factors, discrimination, sectarianism, institutional culpability and collusion. This can sometimes be linked to a broader discourse of human rights, transitional justice and reconciliation. These are two world views you can accept or quote. They are fundamentally opposed. It is hard to see how you can have a shared process when you acknowledge this fact.

Finally, there is the question raised very sharply—it has already been alluded to—by Mr Adams at the weekend when, under pressure, he made an important comment about the Maria Cahill case, which has attracted a lot of attention. It was an alleged rape by a suspected IRA member in 1997. Mr Adams has been under a great degree of media pressure in both the north and the south about this. He said:

“The IRA has long since left the scene so there is no corporate way of verifying”,

what happened in this case. What does this mean for any wider shared process of recovery from the past? The state definitely has a corporate memory but he is now saying the IRA has no corporate memory. It has disappeared. What can this possibly mean for a shared process? These are the reasons for my scepticism. I regret to say these things. I think there are things that the state can do unilaterally and a great deal of consideration should be given to those things, but the shared process seems at this moment, I deeply regret to say, very elusive.