Northern Ireland (Ministerial Appointments and Regional Rates) Bill

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Jeffrey M Donaldson

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 24th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson]

I commend the hon. Gentleman on all he has done as Chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. Does he agree that at times we see double standards operating in Northern Ireland? In the constituency of Belfast South, we had a most brutal murder in a pub of a young man by members of the IRA, and as a result my party and others questioned Sinn Féin’s fitness for government and confidence in that fitness, yet the SDLP did nothing, absolutely nothing, to challenge Sinn Féin on that issue and its fitness for government. Are there not double standards operating here? Is one murder not worth more than the RHI scandal?

[Mr Robertson]

The right hon. Gentleman raises an important point, and it goes back to the point I was trying to make earlier: we either accept that we have to work with people we do not like and do not want to work with, or we do not, and if we do not accept that, there is no power sharing. It is as simple as that.

I am afraid it is a very good point that parties on both sides have had to work with people they do not want to work with. There are accusations about certain Members of the Assembly, and if they were in this place and we had to work very closely with them, maybe we would not like that either, but it has had to happen for the sake of devolution and the institutions.

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to draw our attention to some of the terrible crimes that have been committed. The shadow Minister has been questioned on the issue of citing crimes from across the board; I know that he very much condemns crimes wherever they come from.

The Select Committee is concluding its report into Libyan-sponsored IRA activity, and I was rereading the proposed document this morning. I will not go into the details as the Committee has not considered it, but in that draft report are many examples of IRA violence—of the way the IRA has torn lives apart. Rereading some of those things this morning in the car as I came down to Westminster served as a reminder of what has gone on in Northern Ireland and how unacceptable it was.

I do not want to get into the issue of the prosecution of the soldiers at this point as that strays from the central part of our debate, but of course one side in the conflict always referred to it as “the war.” They did so because that excused the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children. So one side had a “war” and the other side was expected to go by the book—or the yellow card, to be precise. That is a very unfair way of looking at this whole situation and the whole legacy issue.