Lord Trimble
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(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Trimble
My Lords, the Leader of the House is right in saying that it is clear that on Bloody Sunday 14 innocent people were killed, that the killings were all individually wrong and that mistakes were made in the planning and conduct of the operation. As he also says, however, lessons were learnt, and we saw the fruits of those lessons over the years.
The noble Lord is also right to point to the context. As has been mentioned, there was a serious terrorist campaign already in existence well before Bloody Sunday. That campaign was launched within a mature democracy where there were plenty of opportunities for people to seek reform and change through peaceful and democratic methods, but those who were perpetrating the campaign—the Provisional IRA—knew that their objects could not be achieved by democratic methods. It would be a perversion of what happened on Bloody Sunday if those events were then used to try to justify the wholly unjustifiable campaign that the Provisional IRA launched in 1970.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, no one seeks to justify the campaign of paramilitaries, whatever side they came from, or indeed the deaths that have occurred over the past 40 years in Northern Ireland as a result of that campaign. We have moved a long way from that stage. A number of agreements have been struck, and we now have a great opportunity to bring peace and stability to Northern Ireland, which I know my noble friend wholly supports.