EU Council

Lord Dodds of Duncairn Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

First, I insisted that we were clear that intelligence services were a national competence, not an EU competence, which was why the statement, of which my hon. Friend can see a copy, was issued by EU Heads of State and Governments, not the European Council or the European Commission. That is very important. Certainly, there was a lot of discussion at the dinner of the point my hon. Friend raises. Different Prime Ministers and Presidents made different points and I listened carefully to their contributions.

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

The Prime Minister has rightly paid tribute to the work of the intelligence services, and I am sure he will agree that hundreds of lives have been saved in Northern Ireland over many decades as a result of the excellent work of many intelligence officers. Does he agree that it is important to put on the record the excellent life-saving work of people in the security forces and intelligence services, at a time when it has become ever so fashionable to degrade and denigrate that work and to revise the roles of various groups during the troubles in Northern Ireland?

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point. It is not always possible—in fact, it is hardly ever possible—to identify even the specific pieces of work done by the security services in foiling various crimes or bomb plots, but the fact is that they have done extremely good work on that basis. That is why I quoted the figure of 330 people going through our courts and being convicted since 2001. If we asked people what number they would expect that to be, I think they would come up with something much, much lower. The figure points to the scale of the threat and therefore to the need to maintain a very strong security presence.