Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, I think this is the first time since I came to your Lordships’ House a dozen years ago that I have followed a Cross-Bencher who in Northern Ireland is a member of the Democratic Unionist Party. The noble Lord, Lord Browne of Belmont, has spoken well on this thoroughly useful and comparatively tidy Bill.

The Library’s briefing pack identified this Bill as the first piece of constitutional legislation in Northern Ireland that has undergone recent examination by Parliament without a background of crisis. During the pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill, Lady Hermon MP even elicited from Raymond McCartney, a Sinn Fein MLA, that he did not see any reason why Sinn Fein would not respond to an invitation to give evidence at Westminster, dependent on the context. This was the first evidence from Sinn Fein to a Westminster committee given in public.

That is not to say that one can only have a useful measure in less critical times. A particularly striking instance of that was the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Bill, carried through your Lordships’ House early in the new millennium by the late, great Lord Williams of Mostyn, who, effectively, completely changed the Bill between Second and Third Reading, to its great improvement. My own absorption in Northern Ireland detail has diminished during the past score of years; but I am batting at number six among the 11 initial speakers in this Second Reading debate, which makes me its fulcrum and an apposite place to make the sort of remarks the chorus makes in a Greek tragedy.

I like the format of the Library’s briefing pack and I am delighted that the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee is now used to give pre-legislative scrutiny to new Bills. That House of Commons committee, which I chaired during the 1997-2001 Parliament, did not exercise that power, though we did, after ten years, review the working of the Fair Employment (Northern Ireland) Act 1989. Ken Livingstone, then an MP, who served on that Select Committee before he resigned to contest the mayoralty of London, suggested the review and agreed at first that it should be delayed until the end of 10 years. When we reached the time for the review, he acknowledged that he had originally suspected the legislation to be simply a sop to American critics, but that he now agreed it had made a real beneficial difference.

My only unease about the pre-legislative scrutiny was that it contained 29 recommendations whereas the Government’s response—they claimed that they had addressed each recommendation, as indeed they had—said that the report contained 24. On a day when the Government has made a Statement on, inter alia, UK arithmetic, the Northern Ireland educational establishment can still teach its colleagues in Great Britain something.

Having myself approved the title “National Lottery etc. Bill” in 1993, I suppose it is churlish of me to regard “Miscellaneous Provisions” as an inadequate substitute for,

“measures to improve the operation of the Northern Ireland Assembly”,

and separately,

“donations and loans to Northern Ireland political parties”.

Those were the subjects of consultations by the NIO in 2012 and 2010 respectively, which underlie the Bill and which both have a fine 17th-century timbre. My locus is all the more insubstantial to make these comments when I know even less about d’Hondt than I do about the Duckworth-Lewis scoring method in limited-overs cricket matches. Selfishly, I must say that I hope amendments about d’Hondt will not trouble us in Committee. As it is, there is clear evidence of progress on the size of the Assembly, the dual mandate and the transparency of donations—even if history takes a meandering course and it is less well known than it should be that there was a fall-off in Irish-American donations after Mrs Thatcher gave authority for the United States Air Force to fly bombing raids from British airfields to Libya in the mid-1980s, when France and Germany had declined to do so.

I profoundly welcome the Bill’s attention to detail over the year 2016, not just because of the centenary of the Easter Rising but because of that of the opening salvoes of the Battle of the Somme. I had no role in the Anglo-Irish agreement, the Downing Street declaration, the IRA’s ceasefire in August 1994 or the Belfast agreement, but I did have a role in the 75th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. I represented the Cabinet on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, accompanied by the late Alan Clark, who was representing the Ministry of Defence. The noble Lords, Lord Bannside and Lord Molyneaux, were also present. It was a memorable day, not least because of accidents in the arrangements on the battlefield in both the morning and the afternoon.

In the morning, the local Catholic priest was passed over for his planned prayers, which were then taken at the end of the service at the Lutyens memorial. In the afternoon, under a light but wetting rain at the commemoration of the 36th (Ulster) Division at Helen’s Tower, mishaps were happily overcome. The first happened when the Minister from the Ministre des Anciens Combattants, representing the French Government, having returned to Paris after an excellent local lunch, was therefore not available to take up the tray of fleur-de-lys, which were refused in turn by the lady Mayor of Thiepval—population 86—and the British ambassador and were eventually accepted by me. The second was because of the ambiguity in a sentence in the service sheet to the effect that a piper, “will play a lament. Wreaths will be laid”. The latter phrase could have made the actions either simultaneous or consecutive.

The truly memorable event of 1 July 1991 was that, back in Belfast, the inter-party talks of that summer continued under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Mawhinney, who during the day negotiated an agreement that the talks had now run their course and should be brought to a gentle close. It was agreed that the close should be temporary and that the gentleness should bind everyone not to get into the blame game, so that the talks could be peacefully resumed in due course, as indeed they were, to the long-term benefit of the peace process. If useful Bills go well, the climate improves and we must hope that this is true this time too.