Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill

Debate between Lord Eames and Baroness Hoey

Committee stage
Thursday 11th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Eames (CB)]

My Lords, I make no apology for the fact that my contributions to the debates on this Bill and legislation stem from my personal experience over the years with victims and survivors, and their families. If noble Lords had a similar experience, they would live with it and continue to live with it until the end of their lives.

At this juncture in our debates, we are addressing for technical reasons—which I accept—and for reasons of jurisprudence and legality, what is, I believe, the greatest failure of this proposed legislation. It is proposed that victims and survivors will be denied the last jurisprudential opportunity to gain some answer to their doubts, worries and concerns, and above all their search for justice.

I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, recently referred to the death of my long-term colleague and friend, who began, as I did, to study law at Queen’s, all those years ago, and who ended up as Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. For reasons that must be obvious, I personally know something of the strain that he encountered during the Troubles, and the honesty, integrity and decency of Bob Carswell needs no defence from me. I pay tribute today to a man who often sat beside me on these Benches of latter years.

I cannot speak too strongly of the feeling of so many people who have encountered grief, loss and sorrow during the Troubles when they view the proposals of this Bill, and in particular the amendments and the area that surrounds them that we are looking at currently. They are to be denied the possibility of answers to their questions, and denied the justice that they feel is not just a legal necessity but a legal obligation. They are to be denied the possibility of having their questions answered and doubts removed. Now we see what is proposed in our legislation. To say that it is adding salt to the wounds is too little; it will be devastating in its effect. We must put on record that this Committee recognises, beyond the technicalities that our legal friends are now explaining to us, the human side of what is happening and what is proposed.

Many tributes have been paid to the Minister, and I add my name to them, for I do not know how he has had the patience to listen to so many approaches. But I say to him that, on this occasion, he must recognise above all else that, in guiding us through this legislation, he is defending something that we who live and work there, and who have had our being in Northern Ireland, find extremely hard to accept. That must be said plainly. Above all else, if this Committee does not hear those voices and those claims, we are failing to do the duty that we are obliged to fulfil.

The last thing I will say at this stage is simply this. Whatever the future of this proposed legislation, whatever the future of the peace process in Northern Ireland, and whatever the future for the new generation coming up who will read in the history books what so many of us have lived through—whatever the answers to those questions are—what remains fundamental is justice in its widest human sense. For that reason, I add my support to these amendments.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I give my support to Amendment 154A, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Faulks and Lord Godson. We are now on the fourth day of Committee, but it has been six months since this Bill was first introduced to the Lords. I kept hoping that, as time went on and on, somebody in the Government would think that this was one of the Bills that they should be retreating on and getting rid of, as they seem to be doing with so many other Bills. But here we are, and so we want to ensure that we end up with the best Bill possible.

Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill

Debate between Lord Eames and Baroness Hoey

Committee stage
Tuesday 24th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, first, I have a quick comment on the previous debate. Many noble Lords—in fact, nearly all—talked about the consensus in Northern Ireland opposing this legacy Bill. I just remind them that there may be consensus, but it is from very different points of view.

My Amendment 63, which is also in the name of the noble Lords, Lord Bew, Lord Godson and Lord Empey, is designed to narrow the criteria for a reinvestigation being started by the ICRIR. If the previous investigations listed in my amendment, such as by the HET or the PSNI’s Legacy Investigation Branch, and the stated need for the provision of “compelling new evidence”—a phrase that I remind noble Lords was thought necessary and appropriate for the overseas operation Act—are not added to the Bill, I have a very depressing prediction to make to your Lordships’ House. I think the ICRIR will end up reinvestigating many—indeed, every one—of the nearly 4,000 deaths. The cost will be billions of pounds, not the budgeted £250 million, and the process will last not for five years but for a decade or more, because this is where judicially led enquiries go, especially when internationalised. If the ICRIR, as suggested in the Minister’s letter to noble Lords on 17 January, is obliged to act simply on allegations, that can be the only consequence.

Legacy practitioners—which is the new force in Northern Ireland, not the victims’ relatives as the Bill believes, I believe, naively—using the concept of collusion, or “collusive behaviours”, the version relied on now by the Police Ombudsman, can design a case to investigate every death. Collusion can be alleged in relation to all loyalist killings and, indeed, all republican ones, by virtue of the use of security force agents in both paramilitary groups, let alone alleged investigatory failings that Strasbourg complains of.

When I spoke at Second Reading of the overseas operations Bill, almost exactly two years ago on 20 January 2021, I said:

“Let us not forget that the only cases now involving veterans are ones pending in Northern Ireland, which concern events of 50 years ago or more. For that reason, we need to get on with a Northern Ireland equivalent law”.—[Official Report, 20/1/21; col. 1236.]


Of course, extending that Act to cover Operation Banner, as I suggested then, and others, would have dealt with the issue in hand, rather than this increasingly complex confection of ICRIR.

No murder case in England would ever see this level of reinvestigation, and certainly not of funding. Have we learned no lessons from the Iraq historical allegations, and solicitor Phil Shiner? Let us remember, as was mentioned earlier, that it is good to remind people of who actually died in the three decades of the Northern Ireland terrorist campaign. Nearly 4,000 persons died violently; 60% of the deaths were caused by republicans and 30% by loyalists. The state—police officers and soldiers—was responsible for approximately 10% of the killings. Very few of those state killings were unlawful, as the force used was not unreasonable, but all the republican and loyalist murders were most certainly unlawful.

The rewriting of history is about the complexity of the Troubles being distorted into a single concern with state killings, which of course republicans and their allies then use, slowly, case by case, to construct the narrative of the IRA being somehow a popular resistance force that had no alternative to killing. The Committee of Ministers at the Council of Europe, when enforcing the ECHR judgments on the so-called McKerr line of cases, refers only to killings

“either during security force operations or in circumstances giving rise to suspicion of collusion in their deaths by security force personnel.”

So Strasbourg has effectively accepted a nationalist perspective on the matter for the past 20 years, and there has been no public challenge by our Government. Some 90% of victims’ families are thus being told by the human rights court that they do not really matter. They are not wanted in the world of lawfare; they are an embarrassment.

When ICRIR opens for business, I believe the following will happen: there will be a smattering of requests for reviews from very distressed relatives; the IRA Army Council will almost certainly not be tempted by the immunity opportunity; and loyalists may not know how to respond. The vast majority of requests will be from legacy practitioners, once again, who will demand rigorous reviews—in fact, new criminal investigations—of hundreds of cases on the flimsiest of allegations, unless curbed by our amendment. The Northern Ireland Office has to brace itself for the judicial reviews and civil suits that will keep on coming.

Legacy has been a poisoned chalice since the Belfast agreement, and it is worth remembering that the 1998 document never envisaged what has since happened. About victims it said simply:

“The achievement of a peaceful and just society would be the true memorial to the victims of violence.”


The United Kingdom failed to deal with legacy, although we now have something close to peace. There has been no substitution; nobody has brought forward a real legacy plan since the Eames-Bradley report of 2009, which did have some elements of legacy. The only credible initiative was from former Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde’s Historical Enquiries Team within the PSNI. But that was closed down because a radical academic, given access, misconstrued what was happening, and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary joined in the unwarranted criticism of the PSNI and HET—I believe to the anger of Sir Hugh.

This amendment is designed to stop mission creep by the ICRIR. It needs to be accepted because, without a statutory mention that narrows access and prohibits repeat applications, the commission’s remit will grow, just as the police ombudsman’s did. We need finality and I hope that the Minister will respond in detail to my speech and those of other noble Lords on this very important issue.

[Lord Eames (CB)]

My Lords, in his response to the previous debate on the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, I fear that the Minister may have misunderstood some of the phrases I used in my own remarks. I do not in the slightest attach any personal criticism to him for the failure of the amendments we asked for from the Government on a previous occasion. I hold him in the highest possible regard personally for all he has done for Northern Ireland, and I hope that that respect is, despite the remarks, mutual.