Northern Ireland Act 1998: Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive

Conor Burns Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office (Conor Burns)]

It is a pleasure to respond to this Adjournment debate. Towards the end of a turbulent day, it seems fitting that we gather in the Chamber tonight to talk about big issues and serious challenges facing part of our United Kingdom. When the Prime Minister asked me to serve as Minister of State in the Northern Ireland Office last September, I became only the second Minister in the 50-year history of the Northern Ireland Office who is from Northern Ireland. As someone who is a Catholic, a supporter of the Union and from Belfast, I feel passionately about Northern Ireland and her wonderful people.

I express tonight my enduring gratitude to the Prime Minister for that opportunity to serve. As has often been said in the past, the best way to keep a secret is to say something on the Floor of the House of Commons, so from this Dispatch Box tonight, I use this opportunity to express my ongoing and full support to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister as he helps us move to a position where we restore the power-sharing institutions that the people of Northern Ireland need so much.

The Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive were established under strand 1 of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, and are underpinned by the Northern Ireland Act 1998. It is vital that all the institutions set up by the agreement are operating fully and effectively, given their interdependence and interlocking nature, to realise the full vision of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. It has been 151 days since the First Minister resigned, and since then there has been no one to lead the Northern Ireland Executive. It has been 61 days since the people of Northern Ireland voted in an Assembly election, and since then the parties have failed to come together to even elect a Speaker, let alone form a Government. It has been 36 days since the Assembly last met, and since then there has been no serious attempt to show the necessary leadership to address the real issues facing households in Northern Ireland—issues that they care about as much as those who live in my constituency of Bournemouth West.

At the commencement of his speech, the hon. Member for North Down (Stephen Farry) made brief reference to the protocol in the context of restoring the institutions of devolved government, and I use the opportunity at the Dispatch Box today to make it clear that the position of Her Majesty’s Government is that there is no reason why there should not be restored devolved government in Northern Ireland, and power-sharing back up and running. Our message has been consistently clear to the Democratic Unionist party: the protocol is for the Government of the United Kingdom to resolve, either through primary legislation, or our preferred route of a negotiated conclusion to this with the European Union, which would require movement on the mandate that Vice-President Šefčovič has been given by the European Commission. We do not see those as interlocking measures. We will deal with the protocol, as we have been clear to the people of Northern Ireland, but we believe that they deserve a functioning devolved Government straightaway.

Meanwhile, Members of the Assembly in Northern Ireland continue to draw a salary, even while unable to conduct Assembly business, and the frustration about that is widely shared across communities in Northern Ireland. The passage of the Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill into law grants the parties a maximum of 24 weeks to form an Executive, and allows existing departmental Ministers to retain their posts during that period, meaning that they may still be in place up until 28 October this year. That provides a degree of stability in Northern Ireland, mitigating the worst effects of the current impasse, but it remains the Government’s view that the leaders of Northern Ireland need to come together and agree a way forward to deliver a stable and accountable devolved Government to the people of Northern Ireland. My sense in my visits across all the six counties in recent months is that that view is widely shared across the whole of Northern Ireland.

While we recognise the existing current impasse, it is worth looking at the amazing progress that Northern Ireland has made over the past 24 years since the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. Those successes are a credit to a generation of foresighted and courageous individuals who had the vision to put reconciliation before division. It was my privilege to be present recently at Queen’s University Belfast to witness the unveiling of a portrait of David Trimble, alongside his wonderful wife Daphne, to acknowledge his immense role in that contentious but courageous agreement. We also fondly remembered the late John Hume and the late Seamus Mallon, both of whom were former Members of this House.

Above all, peace and success in Northern Ireland are a credit to the people of Northern Ireland, whose endurance, kindness and warmth continue to fuel progress. If the politicians and political leaders in Northern Ireland looked to the example of the people, we could make genuine progress in restoring the institutions of devolved government.

In January 2020, the New Decade, New Approach deal provided the foundations for the Northern Ireland parties to come together and form a new Government after a three-year hiatus. That deal is a living monument, against which we regularly check the commitments and progress in achieving them, to what can be realised if people put differences aside, make compromises and forge a path ahead in the interests of everyone, rather than the interests of one group alone.

The hon. Gentleman made a number of specific suggestions in his well-crafted and thoughtful speech about the reform of the institutions and of the mechanisms for sharing power between the parties and between designations. I say to him that we have to tread incredibly carefully in this space. The agreement that was reached 24 years ago was carefully balanced to get the level of cross-community support that it had in the subsequent referendum.

Some of the hon. Gentleman’s suggestions were debated at the margins here and in the other place during the passage of the Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill last year. In response to some of the probing amendments that were tabled, I remember saying to him and others that we, and certainly I, had significant sympathy with the intent behind them—for example, an obvious one is that the posts of First Minister and Deputy First Minister are legally indistinguishable; it is a co-office. The reason that the Government did not decide to legislate or innovate in that space at that time was that, in our view, any recalibration or update of the agreements, and of the institutions and mechanisms that flow from them, is best achieved through cross-party agreement and, obviously, the involvement of the Governments in Ireland and the United Kingdom as the co-guarantors of those agreements.

The hon. Gentleman highlighted many of the ideas contained in the detailed policy paper that his party leader Naomi Long recently sent to Ministers. I studied it carefully on a flight to Belfast last week and read it again this afternoon. We are committed to restoring the institutions of devolved government as they stand today—as they sprang from the Belfast/Good Friday agreement—but as we saw in St Andrews, that agreement can change and be updated.

The hon. Gentleman spoke with knowledge and understanding of the changing political, societal and demographic positions within Northern Ireland. I think it is right that we start using the post-restoration of power sharing and the significant 25th anniversary coming up next year—in partnership with Queen’s University, Ulster University, societal groups, think-tanks and others—to think about how those institutions could be updated and those agreements recalibrated, in parts where we could achieve cross-community consent, to achieve improvements to the delivery of devolved government in Northern Ireland and accountability from locally elected politicians in Northern Ireland directly to the communities they serve.

The final point I would make is that I have been overwhelmingly struck—I say this as a Minister who is accountable for Northern Ireland matters at this Dispatch Box, but also as someone who is very deeply accountable to family members across kitchen tables in Northern Ireland—by how the people of Northern Ireland deserve the best possible opportunities. When I visit schools, businesses, charity groups or the teeming third sector across Northern Ireland, their concerns are very much the same concerns that we would find in any other constituency across the United Kingdom and indeed, I suspect, across these islands in their totality. They deserve that we keep a watching brief on the institutions born of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and the rulebook that governs them to make sure that at all times they are doing the central thing they were set up to do, which is to serve the people of Northern Ireland to the very best of our ability.

Question put and agreed to.