Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill

Debate between Baroness Suttie and Lord Rogan

Committee stage
Monday 13th December 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

I shall speak briefly in favour of Amendment 3, to which I have added my name. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, spelled out, it would provide for the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister to be referred to as Joint First Ministers, reflecting their identical status, powers and responsibilities. I hesitate slightly to speak in too much detail on this amendment when there are quite so many noble Lords in the Room who were directly involved with the various negotiations, but it seems to me that the current terminology allows for a distortion of the reality. In reality, if the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister are entirely equal, can the Minister say what would be the disadvantage of passing this amendment or similar amendments? My honourable friend Stephen Farry said during the debate in the House of Commons when it passed this Bill that making this change would

“take the heat out of the fairly … meaningless contrast that is made and creates huge tension in our election campaigns.”—[Official Report, Commons, 26/10/21; col. 159.]

[Lord Rogan (UUP)]

I rise to support the amendment standing in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Empey. In common with my noble friend, I was there on Good Friday 1998 when the Belfast agreement was finalised. My role at that time was chair of the Ulster Unionist Party. My noble friend Lord Empey was our chief negotiator. He deserves much of the credit for that incredible achievement almost a quarter of a century ago.

It was not a perfect document—far from it. Negotiators from all parties involved in the talks, as well as the two Governments, had endless battles over the finer details of the agreement. Arguably, the biggest battles were around the release of terrorist prisoners, a concession that most unionists hated—we in the Ulster Unionist Party still do. However, the agreement was a compromise. We all had to make concessions that we would rather not have made. It was a delicate balancing act.

Every aspect of the Belfast agreement was critical to the final outcome, including the procedure by which the First Minister and Deputy First Minister were to be elected. The noble Lord, Lord Trimble, who I am pleased to see here today, and the late Seamus Mallon of the nationalist SDLP were the first holders of these posts. They were a joint ticket, elected by a cross-community vote of the Northern Ireland Assembly. That required the support of the majority of the MLAs—a majority of the designated unionist MLAs and of the designated nationalist MLAs. The endorsement of the Assembly, the elected representatives of the people, gave them their authority—the leaders of the unionists and the nationalists working together in the best interests of Northern Ireland as a whole. The noble Lord, Lord Trimble, would openly acknowledge that every day was not harmonious, but at important and often tragic moments, such as the horrific deaths of the Quinn brothers and the Omagh bomb, both in the summer of 1998, the First Minister and Deputy First Minister were able to stand shoulder to shoulder and speak on behalf of the country that they led.

However, all that changed following the St Andrews agreement in 2006. The Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) Act changed the process for appointing a First Minister and Deputy First Minister—and I ask noble Lords to note the word “appointed”, rather than “elected”. Since 2006, the First Minister had been nominated by the largest party overall and the Deputy First Minister by the largest party in the next largest community designation. The reasons for that change were entirely political. First, some MLAs wanted to be able to tell their supporters that they had no hand in electing a nationalist, whether they be from Sinn Féin/IRA or the SDLP, into office. Secondly, as the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, has stated, they wanted to be able to proclaim at every subsequent Assembly election campaign that failing to support them would allow a nationalist to become First Minister, despite the positions of First Minister and Deputy First Minister being a shared office. I am sorry to say that both those reasons are rooted in sectarianism. That is shameful but it is the stark reality.

The Belfast agreement, which the DUP had no hand in and refused to support, was supposed to be a means of ending sectarianism, with the matter of the election of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister a key element of that. Unlike the St Andrews agreement, the Belfast agreement was endorsed by the people and should not have been changed without their consent. The amendment standing in my name and that of my noble friend would restore a key element of the Belfast agreement and deserves your Lordships’ support.