Good Friday Agreement: Impact of Brexit

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for giving us an opportunity to discuss this question, and I hope that this debate is part of a rather belated but important exploration of how we can find a constructive outcome to the situation we find ourselves in.

When the question of the Brexit referendum arose, colleagues here in the rest of the UK, knowing that I was pro-remain, asked if I would be prepared to run a pro-remain campaign in Northern Ireland. I said I certainly would not, and they asked, “Why? Have you changed? Are you pro-Brexit?” I said, “No, but I have spent most of my life trying to help people from different perspectives come and work together on practical political issues, and I know perfectly well what would happen if I were to do such a thing. As a former Alliance leader I would find lots of support in Alliance, Sinn Féin, the SDLP and people in the Ulster Unionist Party, but the DUP would immediately go in the opposite direction and we would have reinstituted a split that some of us have spent most of our lives trying to resolve”. They asked, “Are you going to do nothing?” I said, “Of course I’m going to do something. We’re going to conduct a public conversation about these questions and give a platform and an opportunity to people right across the political spectrum to express their views and engage with each other, and to try to find a way forward”. They said, “What about Nigel Farage?” I said, “We’ll give him a platform too”. Indeed, the more times we gave him a platform, the more things moved towards remain in Northern Ireland. In the end, the Ulster Unionist Party changed its position and said it was pro-remain—Mike Nesbitt told me that it was almost unanimous—and the DUP moved to a position where they said that “on balance” it was pro-Brexit. That means that there had been a lot of thinking about it and engaging in debate, which was constructive and good.

We are dealing here—we know this from our process—with a complex set of relationships, and relationships do not conform to regulation. You have to be careful how you handle them so that you do not make the situation much worse. In fact, the key development we discovered in the process in Ireland was that the problems we are dealing with are not primarily economic or social, or about legalities and policing and the administration of justice, although those are all important things. They are primarily about dealing with disturbed historic relationships. When you have addressed those issues, all those other things can come together in a sensible way. Of course, at that time we were enormously helped by the fact that the historic disturbed relationships within Europe as a whole and between Britain and Ireland were being much more fruitfully dealt with in the context of the European project—at that stage the European Union. Our relationships with the United States were also much improved at that time, because we had people in presidential office who understood the nuance and complexity, in their own country, in their relationship with Europe, and with the British and Irish Governments together.

There were therefore five key sets of relationships: those two I just mentioned, the relationships between Protestants and Catholics and unionists and nationalists in the north, between north and south, and between Britain and Ireland. All five sets of relationships are in trouble. They are not all in trouble because of Brexit; Brexit is an outcome of the fact that these relationships are all in trouble. We need to think an awful lot more about why the politics of the world has changed so that now political leaders do not regard themselves as great statesmen because they are resolving conflict but because they are conducting it. We have to face the reality of where we are, which is that these relationships are not good. Will the Minister take back to his colleagues the importance of addressing all these sets of relationships much more than the question of regulatory detail? I have certainly been passing the message to our friends in Dublin that the Taoiseach’s stance would be much more helpful if it were also addressing those sets of relationships and not just those within the 26 southern counties. That is a temptation for any Taoiseach, of course, but one that previous Taoisigh ignored for much of the last two or three generations.

But relationships change. In that marvellous book by Sellar and Yeatman published in 1930—a profound historical tome called 1066 and All That—they remarked that in his declining years, Gladstone had tried to find an answer to the Irish question, but just when he thought that he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the question. In those days, that was regarded as a negative thing, but people in Ireland are now changing the question in a positive way. No one in Northern Ireland looks at the south of Ireland as a priest-ridden state. On the contrary, social and religious questions in the rest of the island have changed much more dramatically than even in the north. Who is the Garda Commissioner now? It is Drew Harris. His father was in the RUC; he was one of the most senior members of the PSNI; he conducted the counterterrorism operations. My goodness, it was hard for me as Alliance leader to get a meeting with the Garda Commissioner. Now the Garda Commissioner is a member of PSNI, as was.

Things have changed and they have changed politically. A lot of talk has been going on about unionists and nationalists, but the major change in politics in the last 20 years is that there are now three components—three cohorts—in the politics of Northern Ireland. There are the unionists, the nationalists and republicans and a third cohort of largely younger people who have a wholly different set of understandings, socially, economically and politically. A number of colleagues from Northern Ireland have expressed this by saying how much things have changed, and they have. It means, for example, that the leader of the Alliance Party now does not feel that it is her job to bridge between the unionist and nationalist parties, but to present an alternative view in politics which she would describe as a progressive political view. That is different because it is a different place. Relationships have changed.

There is no prospect of going back to political violence because people on the republican side have come to realise that IRA violence was the thing that stopped leading to any sense of unity. It is more likely that over the next 20 years—or even the next three or four years—we could well be in a situation where Sinn Fein was in a coalition Government in Dublin and back in Belfast, and de facto, from its point of view, politically uniting the island of Ireland. Will republicans risk all that by returning to a violence that never worked for them or anyone else? I do not believe so. So I plead with noble Lords to recognise that history is important, but it is the past. In Ireland, we are trying to leave that painful and difficult past behind. Please do not push us back towards it.

Please resist the temptation to fight the battles that you want to fight here about Brexit by using us as some kind of vicarious battlefield. You will only make the situation worse, not better. Things there have changed and are changing for the better. Relationships do that. Relationships change, positively and negatively, but they never change in a linear way. They are complex. Sometimes, the things that you do to bring about one kind of outcome have the opposite outcome from the one that you expected, which we all know in politics. The more that Sinn Féin and politicians in the Republic of Ireland push in an angry way against Brexit, the more they will make unionists stubborn. The more they work to try to build a practical relationship by co-operating together, the more people will become more open. Indeed, if Brexit turns out not to be as successful as those people who voted for it hoped, it is highly possible that a majority of people in Northern Ireland in the next 10 or 15 years will say, “Maybe we would be better off in the European Union”, and will be prepared to vote in that way. If that is the case, the Good Friday agreement, as noble Lords have said, permits and facilitates that. It does not obstruct it. Please allow the relationships to grow and develop in whatever way they do and do not use us in an internal struggle here.

When it comes to relationships, they are mostly not about high principle and high-flown language, and they are certainly not about the low. They are about practicalities and emotionalities. When we were trying to get somewhere in our negotiations towards the Good Friday agreement, every time people started to speak in terms of high principle, the gap opened up. But when we started to talk about practicalities, it became apparent that we could work a lot together. The Foyle Fisheries Commission became a model because the practicality of fishing is that the fish do not recognise a border. If you are going to have fishing on both sides of the border you have to work together, and since the early days of Northern Ireland, that had worked.

To talk about practicalities, if the British and Irish Governments, for example, could reach an understanding on agriculture, the agri-food business and energy, and present that to the European Union and say, “You can do whatever you like with the rest”, that would deal with 95% of the cross-border trade. It would not deal with the England/Ireland trade but cross-border trade.

I appeal to noble Lords to allow the relationships that have been developing at home to continue to develop in a constructive and nourishing way. Who knows? We might, believe it or not, be able to set an example to other places about how we move through a transition, and our current political difficulty is largely one of making that transition to a new dispensation rather than sliding back to the bad old times.