Queen’s Speech

Lord Bew Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, the gracious Speech includes one very important sentence as far as Northern Ireland is concerned:

“Legislation will be taken forward giving effect to the Stormont House Agreement in Northern Ireland”.

Ever since Her Majesty uttered those words in this Chamber, it has become clear that the Stormont House agreement barely exists as a consequence of the stand-off in the votes in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Over the weekend there were what appear to be well-sourced reports in the Northern Irish papers about the possibility of a Stormont House agreement mark 2, but at this point the Stormont House agreement is in a fairly parlous condition.

This is not the Government’s fault. There are a number of miscalculations involved. It may indeed be that, like so many people, Sinn Fein believed the polls during the election campaign and believed there would be a change of Government, which would allow it at least a face-saving move in the context of the austerity issue. I do not actually believe that, had there been a change of Government, there would have been a really significant change in the public finances of Northern Ireland and at Westminster, but there clearly could have been an atmospheric change, which would have been helpful to the Sinn Fein leadership. Anyway, the miscalculation has been made and they are now in a difficult position. The consequences of the arrangements in Northern Ireland are that we are all in a difficult position. It is a difficult moment and it is quite hard to see how Northern Ireland will extract itself.

In his important speech introducing the debate today, the Minister stated explicitly that the Government intended to legislate anyway for those elements of the Stormont House agreement that lay within their sole area of responsibility. He included in this respect measures for dealing with the past and the legacy of the Troubles, proposals that essentially emerged from the Haass talks some time back. I have no problem in principle with the suggestion that the noble Lord articulated about the need for an oral history archive. I only wish to say that I speak from fairly bitter personal experience, having been involved in the setting up of an oral history archive at Boston College, when I say that these things can become very fraught, very difficult and very painful. Very careful thought is required so that this particular idea does not run into some of the same difficulties that we ran into. I am afraid that good intentions, in this respect, are not enough.

I wish to advance one point with great seriousness: the need for a government strategy in this area that is more proactive than it has been in the past—I speak of both the Conservative/Lib Dem Government and the Labour Government, which were so important during the peace process. In handling the past, we have actually managed to garner essentially the worst of both worlds. A classical example is the decision, which is confirmed in the Conservative manifesto, that there should be no general amnesty. There are very good reasons for this, not least the provisions of the Good Friday agreement, which the noble Lords, Lord Trimble and Lord Empey, played such a role in bringing about in 1998. That having been said, the on-the-runs controversy has convinced many ordinary citizens that there is in effect at least a partial amnesty for terrorists. Therefore, we have garnered, in a sense, the worst of both worlds. The Government’s posture is typically defensive and crouching. Somehow, details and stories of allegedly nefarious activity by state agents—sometimes not allegedly but definitely nefarious activity by state agents—keep coming out, again and again and again, most recently in last Thursday’s “Panorama” programme.

I want to argue that there needs to be a moment of reflection about what information to release and how to do it. The manifesto commitment of the Conservative Party says something very interesting. It says that, in government, it is not going to be party to rewriting the past—logically, that means rewriting the past in the interests of terrorists. However, that cannot be left just as a pious hope or aspiration. Thought has to be given to the contextualisation of material and, I suspect, a fairly radical approach to the release of the material, but not in some sort of vacuum.

Let me say something that struck me very forcibly last week when Sir Brian Cubbon’s death was announced. Three decades ago, Sir Brian Cubbon was in the car in which the British ambassador to Dublin was blown up and killed. Judith Cook, a young official who was a contemporary of mine in Cambridge, was also killed, and Sir Brian was badly injured. Cubbon was a great patriot at the centre of policy; later, he would be in the Home Office as PUS, but in the late 1970s he was in Northern Ireland. Cubbon is now gone. He is now not available to explain to us the context of policy and the difficult decisions that any liberal democratic state has to take in the face of a dirty, sectarian war and terrorism. It is this type of testimony that the Government should be preserving. It is quite remarkable that, if you want to learn about the mistakes that the British Army made on Bloody Sunday, we have published a multi-volume account to tell that to you. If you want to understand what happened in the background to the murder of Pat Finucane, a multi-volume account is available to you, all published by the state. But if you want to know how a liberal democratic state tried somehow to palliate a brutal, sectarian civil war and eventually bring peace to a troubled Province, we have not a word to say.

I am really arguing here that candour is the best policy, but there is a moment for thought here. If we are going to go ahead and implement the elements of the Stormont House agreement that are not dependent on the local parties, we should take our time and reflect carefully on how we actually do it.