Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill

Baroness O'Loan Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 10th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O’Loan (CB)]

It is with a very heavy heart that I speak to noble Lords today. First, I would like to join those who have paid tribute to Sir Anthony Hart for his superb work, and to express my sympathy to his family. We have lost a very distinguished public servant in Northern Ireland.

Being without a Government for two and a half years has been quite difficult for us. We are stuck. The consequences for our economy, which is now in decline, are well known. Our health service is struggling. Our education service, as noble Lords have pointed out, requires significant development and our past has not been dealt with in a coherent and constructive way. That is all well known.

There seems to be little evidence that the current negotiations will produce an Executive. We do not know what is being discussed at these purported negotiations; the signals are profoundly depressing. The Secretary of State told us yesterday that they have had 150 meetings, but they could not have the one that worked it out together.

There are hundreds of issues on which the parties could unite for the common good, and there is urgent need for actions that could benefit our whole community and would not be contentious. Such actions would begin to heal some of the harm done in the past two and a half years, when so much trust has been eroded in our democracy. Sinn Féin continues publicly to support the deeply anti-democratic campaign of murder by the Provisional IRA. It is deeply resented, not just by Unionism. In private conversations we are receiving no assurances of any kind. The noble Lord, Lord Morrow, said that nothing is coming.

What happened yesterday in the other place was reminiscent of colonial days. The people of Northern Ireland are being denied the right the law accords them to make their own decisions in devolved matters. Through the amendments introduced yesterday, the other place has driven a coach and horses through the Good Friday agreement, which I would remind noble Lords is an international treaty binding on the United Kingdom. In addition, by doing this, the other place has given effect to the demands of Sinn Féin and taken a decision against the DUP. Others are saying that the DUP is very happy about this because it will not have to deal with those two issues. I have not heard noble Lords here or colleagues elsewhere express that view.

In imposing a deadline of 21 October for the negotiations to succeed, in the absence of which the Government will have to act in accordance with this Bill, the other place has taken away from the people of Northern Ireland their right to make their own decisions about matters which in law are devolved to them. They have acted in a partisan manner.

It is not that devolved powers have been withdrawn from Northern Ireland; they will exist in parallel with this Bill. In continuing to present this Bill—of course, the Government could withdraw it—the Government have made it much more unlikely that Sinn Féin will come to the table with open hearts and willing minds. It does not need to do so. It can just sit and wait until the Members of the other place do the work for it. As a consequence of the other place passing these amendments, Sinn Féin does not have to engage in democracy to achieve its ends; it can just say, “We refused to engage and look what happens”.

In 1967, the Parliament of Northern Ireland voted against embracing the Abortion Act. In 2016, the Northern Ireland Assembly, as noble Lords have heard today, voted by a clear majority not to change our abortion law in any way. The Government have consistently given assurances to the people of Northern Ireland that the devolution provisions will be respected. On 30 October last, I pointed out that in June of that year, the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, gave me an assurance that the intention of the Government and the NIO,

“is to restore a power-sharing agreement and arrangement in Northern Ireland so that it will be up to the people of Northern Ireland and their elected officials to decide on abortion policy”.—[Official Report, 6/6/18; col. 1312.]

In October 2018, the Minister said:

“As someone who comes from part of the kingdom which has a fully functioning devolved Government, I stress again that these decisions must be taken by the devolved Administration in the north of Ireland. There is no point in pretending we can usurp democracy in that fashion, simply because devolution is not to our liking. Devolution must function even when it is not as we would like to see it, but rather, how it must be”.—[Official Report, 30/10/18; col. 1278.]


As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, until last week we did not know what would be in the amendment. We had intimations that it might be coming, but the first we saw of the Creasy amendment was on Thursday morning last. Within hours, it had been passed by the House of Commons. The expectation was that the Speaker would do the right thing and exclude it because it was outside the scope of the Bill. The transparent inappropriateness of this was further underlined by the fact that—entirely consistent with the vote by the democratically elected Northern Ireland Assembly in 2016—100% of our MPs voted against the provision. It was imposed on us by more than 300 MPs who have neither consulted us nor represent us.

If we meddle in the affairs of Northern Ireland in this heedless way; if we do not object to the House of Commons introducing clauses which have nothing to do with the Bill before the House; if we accept that the Government have lost control of Parliament; if Parliament allows one person—the Speaker of the other place—to make his own decisions about what can and cannot become law, without having regard to international treaty obligations such as those which derive from the Good Friday agreement, human rights law and even the domestic law of the United Kingdom, we are surrendering our democracy and our much cherished constitution. For Northern Ireland, with 17 MPs in a Chamber of 600-plus, there is no democracy now. Devolution has gone, in effect, on those occasions on which Parliament decides it wishes to act against it.

The Select Committee on the constitution of your Lordships’ House, in a paper published just nine days ago, entitled The Legislative Process: the Passage of Bills through Parliament, stated at paragraph 39:

“We regret that legislation relating to Northern Ireland has regularly been fast-tracked. This has become common not just for bills which might be required to address urgent or unforeseen problems, but for routine and predictable matters such as budgetary measures. The political stalemate in Northern Ireland has led to an absence of a functioning Executive and a democratic deficit. Fast-tracking bills relating to Northern Ireland reduces further the scrutiny these measures should receive. Routinely fast-tracking in this way is unacceptable, unsustainable and should only be used for urgent matters”.


I have no doubt that the ultimate purpose of these amendments is to change Northern Ireland and UK law by decriminalising abortion. I know that many of your Lordships will have a different view on abortion from me, and I accept that, but that is not actually the point today. Clause 9 would mean that abortion would cease to be subject to any penalty in all circumstances. That means that any baby, at any stage of gestation, right up to birth, could be aborted without penalty. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, there is no human right to kill unborn babies.

I believe, as do hundreds and thousands of others, that human life exists from the moment of conception and that it should be protected at all times. Even those who are pro-choice are now beginning to accept that abortion is about killing babies. If you are three or five months pregnant and you go for a scan, the radiographer does not say to you, “That’s your foetus” or “That’s your embryo”. They say to you, “That’s your baby”. When I lost my baby, as the consequence of a bomb explosion, the doctor who stood at the end of my bed did not say to me, “Your pregnancy is over”. He said to me, “Your baby is dead”.

I will say a word to the noble Baroness, Lady Harris. I reassure her that neither I nor hundreds of thousands of people in Northern Ireland feel oppressed, down- rodden or deprived of equality—far from it. We think that our law brings freedom to mothers and their children, and we seek to support them. I spoke in Oxford just a couple of weeks ago on freedom of conscience, and at the end of it, a woman came up to me. She said that she had recently carried a baby who had Down’s syndrome, and at each of her prenatal visits, the doctor had said to her, “You know it would be much easier—you could have an abortion. You should have an abortion”. It was a constant message, right through her pregnancy—a time when women are most vulnerable.

Let us be very clear. Clause 9 would change the law in England and Wales. The Member for Walthamstow said in the other place in June last year:

“We would like to repeal sections 58 and 59 of OAPA”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/6/18; col. 207.]


Those are the penalty provisions of the Offences against the Person Act. This clause will override not just the expressed will of the last democratically elected Northern Ireland Assembly but the deliberations of this Parliament.

I do not believe that those who voted as they did in the other place yesterday really intended to abolish any penalty for unlawful abortion in the UK, yet that would be the effect. If we decriminalise abortion—that is what this amendment seeks to do—we will make abortion available up to birth. I do not know how many of your Lordships have known the beauty and the terror of the moment of birth: the moment when a new soul, a beautiful little baby, comes into the world. It is a moment of absolute wonder. I accept that there are occasions when women do not want to carry their babies to term, but we need to be very clear that abortion is not a painless, clean, medical process. A baby will be killed in the womb through medication, have poison injected into its heart so that it is born dead, or it might just be born alive, as are an average of 30 babies each year in England and Wales, and left to die. In that brave new world, there will be fewer and fewer children with disabilities, as they do not merit the right to life. According to the Bill before your Lordships’ House, children with disabilities will be given no protection. Yet we know that while children may be born with disabilities, that is not the sum total of the reality of their existence; they deserve more than to be defined by their disability.

In England and Wales, we abort children because they are the wrong sex—we have proof of it—and because they have conditions like club feet and cleft palates, which are eminently curable. In effect, we have abortion on demand up to 24 weeks, and we will have abortion to birth. What sort of civilisation would countenance the killing of defenceless, unborn babies in the place where they should be safest: the mother’s womb? What sort of civilisation does this right up to the moment a baby is born?

Reverting to parliamentary procedure, there has been no White Paper, no Green Paper, no consideration of the impact of the provision, no consultation, no explanatory memorandum from the Member for Walthamstow, no consideration of conflicting current legislative measures. There has been no provision even for this to be done with the proper parliamentary procedure through both Houses of Parliament, rather than a Statutory Instrument subject only to negative resolution, which is all that would be required—the least accountable form of legislation. There will be no discussion in either Chamber of where medical science is in relation to the life of the unborn child, and no consideration of the pain which we know unborn babies suffer when they are aborted. There has been no thought of what we are saying as a people when we force this measure through at the behest of an unelected, unknown committee, operating under a complaints procedure contained in a protocol to a convention.

The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly stated that states have a margin of appreciation in these matters: we have the right not to do this and we should not do it. Yet, this is what the other place has determined will dictate our future law, not proper parliamentary process, not even decisions influenced by the finest legal minds in the country making decisions in our Supreme Court, with the protections afforded by our resolute application of the rule of law. It is profoundly and fundamentally wrong that we should agree to consent to the disposal of human life before birth by means of a measure that was designed only to extend the period for forming an Executive in Northern Ireland until 21 October, and to grant powers to the Secretary of State to extend the period to 13 January 2020. We must reject this in Committee; if we do not, Northern Ireland will have had abortion foisted on it at a time of political crisis by the Parliament of a country that has some responsibility for what has happened to it in the past. There are those who are seeking to inflict on us more troubles. We have seen the bombing attempts. Last night, we saw the problems at bonfires as we approach 12 July—environmental problems that nevertheless resulted in rather more serious problems. Many of us still live in fear, and it is not an irrational fear. We have huge problems, with marginalised, impoverished and deprived people living in bleak conditions, where the rule of the terrorists still operates. Let us be under no illusion: the rule of the terrorists still operates in Northern Ireland.

It seems to me that despite the best efforts of the Minister and all those concerned, the Government have stood by and done very little for the past two and a half years. It will be worse if we acquiesce in this travesty of a Bill, containing a clause imposing abortion on demand on a people who have repeatedly said they do not want it.

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[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

I thought that the points made by the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, were significant and came at an appropriate time, almost at the end of the debate. I know that there are very strong views on the amendments that came before the House of Commons yesterday, and which passed with large majorities. I have my personal views on those issues, but the point is that none of this would have been necessary had an Assembly been up and running. The legislation before us even tells us that if an Assembly is up and running by 21 October, it could still take the decision.

I understand the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and others, about perverse incentives—so that people say, “We can pocket this and then deal with other issues”. I understand all that. It is in the hands of politicians in Northern Ireland, though, to decide on abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters, if they decide to come to an agreement before the time in the first part of the Bill, which I support this evening. It is the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill: that is what it is about.

What troubles me is that there is an inconsistency in some of the arguments tonight about how the decision made by the other place—before us on Monday, in Committee—will somehow disrupt the whole talks process; that it will delay the formation of an Executive and an Assembly. But that is perverse, too. If we look at the Bill, obviously there are things that have caught the imagination of the media and others: abortion and same-sex marriage. However, in my 32 years as a parliamentarian I have never seen a Bill that has references to reports and debates in the way that this one has. It talks about issue after issue after issue—all of them significant. These include dealing with Troubles-related incidents, the Attorney-General, legacy cases, problems affecting gambling, issues affecting pensions—which the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and others have mentioned, and which I hope the Government will support on Monday—and the institutional abuse of children. There is also the tragic death of Sir Anthony Hart. But if we go through the Bill, those are all issues that should be devolved—every one of them. Yet, frankly, Parliament is losing patience. That is what is happening. I am not losing patience; I never did when I was in Northern Ireland.

Incidentally, on the issue of abortion, I always argued that that should be a matter for the Northern Ireland Assembly. I never took a decision on it when I was Secretary of State. I could have but I did not. But we have come to a stage where people are getting fed up: it will be nearly three years, by the time this Bill is enacted. This should now be an incentive to political parties in Northern Ireland and to the Government. The Government have not achieved the best on this issue, in the past few months.

[Baroness O’Loan]

I just want to ask the noble Lord a question. Can he explain why Sinn Féin should come back to the negotiating table, when it got what it asked for? Why should it come back? There is no reason whatever.

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen]

If Sinn Féin has the interests of Northern Ireland at heart, I will give a couple of examples of why it should come back. At the moment, outstanding issues in Northern Ireland include: compensation to victims of historical abuse; a strategy to deal with bovine TB; a decision to reduce the maximum stake on fixed-odds betting terminals; university tuition fees; the mergers of schools and hospitals; the reform of adult social care; pay rises for National Health Service staff; and the cruise ship terminal in Belfast. Issue after issue after issue has already been discussed. If Sinn Féin does not agree with that, it has to be pointed out to it, and that is for the Government and the other parties to do. If equal marriage and, obviously, the Irish language are the only issues that Sinn Féin is concerned with—everyone knows that the problems surrounding those issues are huge—then better if it is all a sham. If, at the end of the day, they are saying, “We’ve got what we wanted because the British Parliament has given it to us so we’re not going to bother any more”, there is no hope at all for the future—none. We can have an Assembly and Executive formed in Northern Ireland only if there is agreement.

Before the noble Baroness intervened on me, I was going to mention the position of the Government. The amendments introduced yesterday were not government amendments but, with such a big majority, clearly lots of MPs from different parties voted for those things. The Government should now be in a position to go back to Northern Ireland, talk to the parties—quite rightly since, as we have seen here today, some of them are really aggrieved by what has happened—and explain that more and more of this will happen unless there is a devolved Assembly and Executive. That is difficult, of course. There will be Brexit, a new Prime Minister and probably a new Secretary of State. There are the holidays, and then there is the marching season—all things that prevent progress on these issues.

I tell your Lordships one thing: if I had given up in 1997 when we were dealing with the Good Friday agreement because I did not think there would be an agreement, we would not have had one. The same goes for the other agreements that eventually followed. If we had thrown our hands up in the air and said, “We give up. We’re not going to deal with this. We’ll never get it done because the divisions are so deep”, nothing would have happened. Yet we got that Good Friday agreement. The current situation is a dereliction of duty by the parties in Northern Ireland, including Sinn Féin, that have not taken their place in the Assembly. That is part of the Good Friday agreement, but they are going against it and breaking it by not being Members of the Assembly or the Executive, and that should be pointed out to them.

Who will do the pointing out? There will, I assume, be a new Secretary of State, but I think there should be a facilitator—a George Mitchell; a chairman, if you like—at this delicate time, particularly when the Government are in chaos because of Brexit and new Prime Ministers. The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Empey, was very valid: everyone has to be involved in these talks. Only when you can bounce ideas, resolutions and suggestions off different people will they work.

I am not happy that we are in a position where we may not see an Assembly over the next few months—far from it. I chaired strand 1 of the talks on setting up the Assembly; I had to deal with every single detail of it, month in, month out, because it was so significant to the success of the process. I am deeply disappointed and distressed that we are nearly three years in and do not have an Assembly. But beware: if we say, “We’re not going any further with these talks”, we will have direct rule. I think my noble friend Lord Dubs and I are the only direct-rulers, as it were, in the Chamber today. I did not like the role I took: I was a Member of Parliament for a Welsh constituency taking decisions on behalf of 1.5 million people in Northern Ireland. It was not right that it happened then and it will not be right if it happens again. If there is direct rule, though, what we saw yesterday in the House of Commons will be repeated time and again on all the other issues that affect the people of Northern Ireland.

This is in the hands of the Government and the political parties in Northern Ireland. I accept the point about Sinn Féin and the fact that it has got one of its demands, but at the same time it is in the hands of the parties and the Government to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Let us get an Assembly and Executive up and running in Belfast.

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[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

We can provide that information in a Written Answer. That would be helpful to the House. I will lodge it in the Library and write to the noble Lord so that he has that information.

[Baroness O'Loan]

The Minister has just told us that there are very few issues still dividing the parties. Since we are effectively being threatened in this Parliament tonight, can he tell us what those issues are?

[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

I do not think anything I have said this evening should be interpreted as a threat—not in the slightest. What I am trying to ensure is understood is that these are perennial issues which we are fully aware of. An Irish language Act and a culture Act, and how these might fit together, remain challenging issues which need to be resolved. There are other, smaller issues, but these can be addressed and achieved in the right safe space in Northern Ireland. That is the ultimate ambition. It must be done by those parties in Northern Ireland.

Going back to the earlier point, there are five facilitators, not six, and they represent current and retired civil servants, but I will provide the details. I am grateful for that very helpful clarification.

The important thing to stress is that the Bill itself is, at its heart, simple. Its ambition is sensitive and straightforward. However, we are actively considering both abortion and same-sex marriage, and how we can take this matter forward, reflecting, as we are, the significant majorities, voices and views of the other place. It is important that I touch upon the issues that have come from the other place, because they have dominated much of the discussion. We need to ensure that those amendments—

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[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

I certainly do not wish to curtail the ability of the Members in this regard, but noble Lords can lodge amendments just now. The Government have to actively engage to try to establish how they can move these matters forward. As I said at the outset, the challenge we face is that the amendments which have arrived with us have certain technical deficiencies.

[Baroness O'Loan]

I do not want to be difficult, and I thank the Minister for giving way. If I want to table an amendment, draft it on the basis of the Bill before us and then something different is produced, my amendment will be pointless. What about the report of the Constitution Committee, which said that law relating to Northern Ireland should not be dealt with in this rushed way, and that it is totally unacceptable?

[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

The noble Baroness has raised this point before, but I say again that we have received from the other place a very clear instruction and we will have to move forward within the constraints of the time available to us. I do not doubt that noble Lords will table amendments, and they will be part of a reconciled list at the time when we are having these discussions. We will seek to move them forward in a manner appropriate to this House, as we would do with any of these matters. That is our ambition. It is not our—