Rosemary Nelson Inquiry Report

David Simpson Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I paid full tribute to the RUC in my statement, but we do the RUC no favours by glossing over any failings. The report makes trenchant criticisms of those failings, but my hon. Friend is right that policing is quite different today. It has a much broader base of support, and is responsible to a locally elected Minister and Policing Board. That is why the report makes no specific recommendations.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

This murder took place in my constituency. Today we have the report, which shows no evidence of collusion in relation to that murder. However, in the same area, 18 RUC officers were butchered by the Provisional IRA. We have had Teebane, La Mon and numerous other atrocities in Northern Ireland. We hear on the rumour mill that another inquiry—into Pat Finucane—could be announced. If so, will the Secretary of State also ensure an inquiry into the 18 deaths of RUC officers that occurred at La Mon and into other atrocities, in the interests of equality?

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question. I am fully conscious of the tragedies in his constituency and the area where he lives. In June 1997, very shortly before the events dealt with in the report, Constables Johnston and Graham were murdered in Lurgan. On the Finucane inquiry, I made a written statement to the House in November, and there was an extended period of reflection while we took in representations. I shall make an announcement soon.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Simpson Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

The hon. Lady probably does not know that I have been using the phrase “enterprise zone” as a cover-all term for a whole range of measures that would revive the private sector in Northern Ireland. I am sure she agrees that it is unsustainable for—according to one report—77.6% of the gross domestic product of the Northern Ireland economy to come from public spending. Tomorrow, we will publish a paper blending our ideas with those of the Executive on how we will rebalance the Northern Ireland economy.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that an enterprise zone across the whole of Northern Ireland is one thing, but if it is interpreted as it was in the 1980s, that will cause major displacements throughout the Province?

[Mr Paterson]

I repeat again what I just said: I have used the phrase “enterprise zone” over the past three and a half years as a cover-all term for referring to investing in a whole range of measures that will help revive the private sector. I have visited the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, and he agrees with me that we must rebalance the economy. The Chancellor will announce the detail of specific measures on enterprise zones in a few minutes, and I hope they will be taken up by the Executive, who will have responsibility in Northern Ireland.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Simpson Excerpts

Wednesday 15th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

The Secretary of State will be aware that it has been announced that individuals from my constituency will stand trial next year for the murder of the soldiers in Antrim. Does the Secretary of State agree with me that the full rigour of the law needs to be applied and that the sentencing needs to fit the crime?

[Mr Paterson]

I think that is a sub judice issue. We support the rule of law and it should be pursued by the legitimate people in authority in the legal sphere and the judicial sphere. It is not for us as elected politicians to interfere.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Simpson Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for his question, and for his interest in Northern Ireland affairs. I do not think I can give a better example than the fact that the current Chief Constable always had good relations with his neighbour when he was chief constable of Leicestershire, but has said that his relations with Fachtna Murphy, the Garda commissioner, are even better. I should like publicly to pay tribute to Fachtna Murphy, who is, sadly, retiring at the end of the year. He has been a great friend of Northern Ireland. The collaboration between the Garda and the PSNI is at an exceptional level, and I look forward to helping it continue.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

The Secretary of State will be aware of the recent series of dissident republican operations in my constituency, including the bomb at a railway bridge and a previous bomb that almost killed three local children. Does he share the Chief Constable’s current assessment of the levels of resources and manpower available to the PSNI?

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful for that question. I am also pleased to send on my sympathies to the hon. Gentleman’s constituents who have been subject to such intolerable attacks, which, thankfully, have not caused death or injury. Last week the Chief Constable said:

“We are absolutely putting huge resources back in, we are going to sustain that next year and the year after until those responsible are brought to justice or they can be persuaded to give up.”

Bloody Sunday Inquiry (Report)

David Simpson Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

This has been a good debate. We are dealing primarily with the Saville inquiry, which of course leads us on to Bloody Sunday. However, may I again remind hon. Members that in Northern Ireland, for a period heading on for 40 years, there has been Bloody Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday? With the greatest respect to right hon. and hon. Members of this House, apart from those who have served in the forces and those of us who live in Northern Ireland, they have absolutely no idea what it was like to live through the very worst of the troubles and the hell on earth that the population in Northern Ireland had to live through. It was horrific—absolutely horrific.

We know that a lot of families lost loved ones. In my own family, I lost four who were butchered by the provos. The only crime they had committed was that they had the guts to put on the uniform of the Crown forces. Because they did that, the provos took them out. They did not murder them—they butchered them. For some families in Northern Ireland, the Saville report provided a form of conclusion that they sought. For many more families, it served only to perpetuate the ongoing denial of the truth about the deaths of loved ones. Many hundreds of families in Northern Ireland do not know, and are not allowed to know, the truth about the deaths of their loved ones. I shall move on to that later.

As the Chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee said, the report itself points out:

“The situation in Londonderry in January 1972 was serious. By this stage the nationalist community had largely turned against the soldiers...Parts of the city to the west of the Foyle lay in ruins, as the result of the activities of the IRA and of rioting young men (some members of the IRA or its junior wing)...A large part of the nationalist area of the city was a ‘no go’ area, which was dominated by the IRA, where ordinary policing could not be conducted and where even the Army ventured only by using large numbers of soldiers.”

That in itself is very revealing.

According to the Saville report, the nationalist community—that must mean the majority of the community in Londonderry—had turned against the Army, and that hostility had been translated into violence, wreckage and devastation. The IRA was active, and indeed it dominated a large part of the city. The report further points out that

“the armed violence had led to many casualties. There had been numerous clashes between the security forces and the IRA in which firearms had been used on both sides and in which the IRA had thrown nail and petrol bombs. Over the months and years before Bloody Sunday civilians, soldiers, policemen and IRA gunmen and bombers had been killed and wounded; and at least in Londonderry, in January 1972 the violence showed few signs of abating.”

It also confirms that Martin McGuinness was pivotal in that orgy of economic and community destruction.

That provides some of the context around the events of that day. Now we have had the report, which has been welcomed by the families and by many politicians and political commentators. It has led to the Prime Minister’s apology, but it has also had other outcomes. It has raised important questions regarding the role and behaviour of Martin McGuinness, who was a committed terrorist at that time. When he gave evidence to the tribunal, he refused to be open and full in his comments and preferred to fall back on his oath of allegiance to the Provisional IRA. We now need to know the truth about Martin McGuinness, not solely in relation to Bloody Sunday but in relation to Frank Hegarty, Patsy Gillespie, Father James Chesney and a host of other atrocities. We also need to know about Martin McGuinness’s party colleague and fellow IRA commander, Gerry Adams.

The Saville report has also now created a fresh campaign and demand regarding events in Ballymurphy. It is clear that there is now to be an attempt to repeat the entire inquiry cycle all over again. Yet at the very time when that is going on, many people in Northern Ireland continue to live with their sorrow and loss, and with the bitter legacy of the long years of the troubles.

We have had an apology from the Prime Minister for the failings of that day in 1972, and if my recollection serves me right, there has also been an apology from the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in relation to Claudy. Yet all across this United Kingdom, whether it be in Aldershot, Birmingham, London, Warrington or all over Northern Ireland, many people—UK citizens— have been abandoned for decades by successive UK Governments. The direct role played by the Irish Republic in the formation, training, financing and arming of the Provisional IRA is a matter of public record. It is a thorny issue, but it is fact. Yet successive UK governments have said nothing and done less than nothing.

Those who campaigned for the Saville Inquiry did so partly on the grounds that the involvement of the state set it apart from all other events and atrocities. However, here is a case in which the direct involvement of a neighbouring state led directly to the deaths of UK citizens, and the UK Government have simply sat on their hands.

Let me again make an appeal to the Government. If Bloody Sunday was different because of the involvement of the state, then so too were the deaths of many UK citizens because of the involvement of the Irish Republic. Without any cost to the UK Treasury, the new coalition Government could press for an inquiry in the Irish Republic. Yet both the Secretary of State and the Minister have yet to make that call. I have to ask why. Why is it that they will not demand the truth? If Bloody Sunday families deserve the truth, then so, too, do all of those other victims in Northern Ireland and on the mainland.

If the Taoiseach was to come to the Dispatch Box in the Dail and apologise for the role that the Irish Republic played for all those years, it would start the healing process in Northern Ireland.

Billy Wright Inquiry

David Simpson Excerpts

Tuesday 14th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

I thank the Chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee for his comments, and commend the Committee for the work that it does for Northern Ireland. He is absolutely right to say that the more we go into the details of these cases, the more apparent the traumatic waste of the troubles becomes. We would like to work with him and his Committee as we seek a way forward on handling the past.

On the question of Omagh, I shall be having a meeting with the relatives affected by that appalling atrocity reasonably soon. As I said earlier, it is our intention to talk to as many people as we can over the coming months, to see whether we can find a means of handling the past that attracts broad support. Sadly, however, I am fully conscious that however hard we try, we will not come up with something that pleases everyone.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I thank the Secretary of State for this report and for his comments today. I want to pay tribute to Mr David Wright, Billy Wright’s father, who is one of my constituents; the family as a whole lived in my constituency. David Wright went the extra mile to try to find the truth of how his son died. No matter what his son was in prison for, he was the responsibility of Her Majesty’s Government and the Northern Ireland Prison Service.

We got the report this morning. It contains 700-odd pages, and even Einstein could not have comprehended it all in the given time. It highlights to me, however, the difficulties that existed at that time in the prison. I pay tribute to the prison officers, who have done a sterling job down through the years, but the senior management of the Prison Service have some questions to answer. Will the Secretary of State tell us what confidence he can give to the people of Northern Ireland in relation to the Prison Service going into the future, and whether any of the senior management who are still alive will pay a price for this?

[Mr Paterson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments, and I endorse his feelings for his constituent, Mr David Wright, whom I met a couple of weeks ago. He has battled staunchly to try to find out how his son died. I also echo the hon. Gentleman’s comments, and those of the Chairman of the Select Committee, about those who work in the Prison Service, who were given great praise in the report.

As for the future of the Prison Service, that matter is now in local hands. It is down to the local Justice Minister, who is accountable to the Assembly and sits on the Executive. I will sit with him on Monday and we will go through the very serious failings that have emerged from the report—which are, of course, from another era—and through its recommendations. What happens next, however, is very much down to the local Minister, working with local politicians.

Terrorism (Northern Ireland)

David Simpson Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Westminster Hall

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Chope and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim (Dr McCrea) on securing the debate on such an important issue. We can all agree that he spoke with passion and honesty about the issue of victims, many of whom, of course, were murdered in his constituency and in his former constituency of Mid Ulster. All of us who have been elected to this House have lost many friends in the past years.

We in Northern Ireland are under no illusions about the past. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim said, we lived through it. We suffered it, visited the homes and followed all the coffins. We embraced the widows and the orphans, and in many cases we had personal loss and heartache to carry while trying to build a better future for others. I have spoken in the past about the members of my extended family who were murdered in such a cold, brutal and matter-of-fact way by terrorists. Those of us who were there during those dark years will carry the scars to our graves, but we are determined that the next generation will have a future better than the past we had.

We do not want the victims of that terrorist brutality to be left behind and under Government policy we run the risk of that very thing happening; we should not allow that. There are two areas of concern in which I believe there is a danger of the Government’s falling into the routine of previous Governments and making the same mistakes. The effect of that would certainly be that those who bore the brunt of the troubles and of vicious sectarian terrorism would be left behind by the Government. I appeal to the Minister in these early days of the Government to change direction and avoid that state of affairs.

The two areas I want to draw to the Minister’s attention are related. The first is the process by which historical cases are dealt with. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim mentioned, the Saville report was recently published; it cost in the region of £200 million. It was essentially a no-expense-spared inquiry. I will not deny those families their moment, but I will highlight the injustice flowing from Saville that automatically falls upon the many thousands of others who have nothing. Very many of those victims and relatives have no answers and no prospect of any answers. In fact, almost daily many people in Northern Ireland have insult added to injury, and must endure lies, which cover like a blanket the truth that everyone knows.

For example, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams continues with the fiction that he was never a member of the very organisation that he was a leader of. How could people ever have confidence in any truth-finding commission when, because of such denials of reality, it is guaranteed that the truth is highly unlikely to emerge? The Government could take a significant step in bringing Adams’s fictional account to an end. They could publish the full security file on him and let everyone see for themselves just how much was known about his activities, including his personal role in creating victims. His continued denial only stymies any attempt to take the historical context forward.

The other thing that Saville has highlighted is the great imbalance between the finances that have been poured into it and funding levels associated with the treatment of other victims of the troubles and the handling of other historical cases. Clearly there is a need, even in financially straitened times, for the Government to do everything possible in that regard.

The second general area of concern that I wish to raise today is not about already existing processes. Rather, it is about those areas relating to the troubles, and to the victims and survivors of the troubles, for which at present there is simply no process in place. Recently the Northern Ireland victims commission argued for the establishment of some sort of truth-finding forum. We also have the recommendations of the Eames-Bradley consultative group on the past.

On the question of a comprehensive truth forum, given that one of the IRA’s main godfathers is in denial about his role, does the Minister agree that Unionists are justified in thinking that it would be a waste of time? On the Eames-Bradley proposals, the then Secretary of State agreed that the so-called recognition payment was unjustifiable. Will the Minister tell us his view on the granting of legitimacy to cold-blooded sectarian terrorists?

That brings me on to the final matter that I wish to raise under this general heading. Those who campaigned for the Saville inquiry did so in large part because they thought that the involvement of the state set it apart—in other words, the Government were up to their neck in it. It was argued that the state should have higher standards than terrorist organisations, and that a democratic Government should uphold and enforce the laws that have been passed.

There have been long-standing allegations about the involvement of elements of the Dublin Government in the setting up and arming of the Provisional IRA. If true, we need to keep in mind what those allegations would entail. If elements of the Dublin Government were involved in the formation and arming of the provos, it would mean that actions by elements of the southern Government had led directly to the murder of UK citizens in places such as Warrington and London.

Those allegations, if true, would mean that elements of the southern Government were implicated in the IRA’s attempt to kill the entire UK Conservative Government at the Grand hotel in Brighton. It would mean that elements of the Dublin Government were implicated in the attempt to kill the UK Cabinet when the IRA fired mortars at No. 10 Downing street. It would mean that elements of the Dublin Government were implicated in the mortar bomb attack on Heathrow airport. It would also mean that elements of the Dublin Government were implicated in the murder of many hundreds of UK citizens in Northern Ireland. If true, the allegations would help to explain why the extradition of suspects from the Irish Republic was so difficult. It would also help to explain why people could organise open collections for republican terrorist organisations in places such as Buncrana, Bundoran and Dundalk.

It is a truly shameful thing that a succession of UK Governments should have failed to press the Dublin Government to put an inquiry in place to investigate those allegations. A succession of UK Governments, of whatever colour, have turned a blind eye to the allegations; never once did they put their own citizens first and demand that the truth be told. In the early days of this new Government, I ask the Minister to have the resolve to end that silence and to press Dublin for a full independent public inquiry into those long-standing allegations.

I made a similar call in the Belfast News Letter a couple of weeks ago, and I was contacted by a number of victims of the troubles from different parts of Northern Ireland. They all said that they agreed with me, making it very clear that this culture of silence needs to be brought to an end by our Government. I take the opportunity to ask the Minister if he will agree to meet the victims of the troubles and to hear their call for such an inquiry; and I ask for Government support for an inquiry.

I know that other colleagues will wish to speak on other matters relating to the victims of the troubles. I do not want to take up any more time. I simply ask the Minister to remember that it is the first duty of Government to safeguard the country’s citizens.

I am sure that this newly formed coalition will have got to grips with the security situation in Northern Ireland, and I am sure that they will agree that there are matters of concern. However, we have a problem in Northern Ireland today with the so-called dissident republicans. I referred to them a while back, saying that I saw no difference between them and the provos because they were all pigs out of the same litter. I was rounded on by many in the press for saying so, because it was thought unsuitable for someone who sits in this grand House to use such language, but I repeat it: they are pigs out of the same litter. I ask the Government not to allow these so-called dissidents to get the same hold over Northern Ireland as the provos did when causing the mayhem, disaster and tragedies that my hon. Friend outlined.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Simpson Excerpts

Wednesday 30th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

2. What recent assessment he has made of the extent of activities of dissident republicans in Northern Ireland.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

3. What his most recent assessment is of the level of security threat from dissident republican organisations in Northern Ireland.

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

7. What recent assessment he has made of levels of dissident paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Swire]

We did, of course, endorse that approach and, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, we wrote the most open-dated cheque in supporting the previous Government’s moves in that direction before the general election. In my opening remarks, I referred to the level of activity among those who reject the peace process and who have, in effect, turned their backs on it. I do not wish to distinguish them by calling them “dissident republicans” because I believe that that gives them a status that they do not deserve. I believe that the security services, particularly the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the Department of Justice in Belfast, which is headed by David Ford, and crucially, the Garda in the Republic of Ireland, are working extremely carefully and closely together to try to prevent these atrocities from happening on a more regular basis.

[David Simpson]

The Minister will be aware that in recent days a 300 lb bomb and a 160 lb bomb have been planted in Northern Ireland by these so-called “dissidents”. Further to the previous question, may I ask whether he will give assurances to this House today and to the people who live in the area where these bombs were put that we will get whatever resources are needed, be they financial or manpower?

[Mr Swire]

The hon. Gentleman’s constituency had the pipe bomb in the grounds of the Brownlow PSNI station on 18 June and the tragic and unacceptable murder of Constable Stephen Carroll by the Continuity IRA. The answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question is that we support any bid by the PSNI for additional resources, and we will make representations to the Treasury as and when necessary, because the security of innocent individuals in Northern Ireland should be paramount in everything we seek to do.