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

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 13th December 2021 Grand Committee

[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.

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to the three amendments in this group. I shall start with the third of them, Amendment 4, which has been spoken to by the noble Lords, Lord Empey and Lord Rogan. They and the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, have talked about going back to, or resetting, the Good Friday agreement, which, as has just been pointed out, had the support of the people in a referendum—not something that happened subsequently—and there is great strength in that. The noble Lord also referred to the situation at the time, which was still overshadowed by the terrorist campaign.

For me, there were two issues about which I disagreed with Prime Minister Blair in the negotiation right up to the very last day. The first was that, in my view, decommissioning and the release of prisoners should have been related. I was quite prepared to go down the road of releasing of prisoners so long as the matériel that they had used and might use was decommissioned. The Prime Minister and the Taoiseach failed to achieve that agreement and all of us suffered for some years after that in addressing that question. That was why the IMC was established—I spent some years working on that.

The other issue was so-called parallel consent, which had actually emerged as a formula from the experience of South Africa, where it was not a formula but an understanding. It was always my view that to identify people as “unionists, nationalists and other” was a mistake, and to draw up an electoral formula based on that would make the situation more problematic. However, I had another proposal: a proposal for a majority of two-thirds—in other words, 67%. It was clear to me that no one party and no one part of the community could pass a piece of legislation if it had to get over two-thirds.

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Moved by

[Lord Alderdice]

5: After Clause 3, insert the following new Clause—
“Disqualification of MPs and Members of the Dáil Éireann for membership of the Northern Ireland Assembly
(1) In section 1A of the Northern Ireland Assembly Disqualification Act 1975 (members of the House of Commons)—(a) in subsection (1), for “the period of 8 days beginning with the day the person is so returned” substitute “the period beginning with the day on which the person is so returned and ending with the day on which Parliament is next dissolved”, and(b) for subsections (2) to (4) substitute—“(2) Where a person is returned as a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly and is subsequently returned as a member of the House of Commons, the person is not disqualified under section 1(1)(za) at any time in the period beginning with the day on which the person is so returned and ending with the day on which Parliament is next dissolved.”(2) In section 1B of the Northern Ireland Assembly Disqualification Act 1975 (members of the Dáil Éireann)—(a) the existing text becomes subsection (1),(b) in that subsection, for “at any time in the period of 8 days beginning with the day the person is so returned” substitute “before Dáil Éireann is next dissolved”, and(c) after that subsection insert—“(2) Where a person is returned as a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly and is subsequently returned as a member of the Dáil Éireann, the person is not disqualified under section 1(1)(db) at any time in the period beginning with the day on which the person is so returned and ending with the day on which the Dáil is next dissolved.””

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

Noble Lords will know that, for some time, I have harboured a degree of anxiety that the fragmentation which we see much more largely in politics around the world and in Europe is affecting the United Kingdom, and that there is a danger that some of the relationships which have stitched us together over the years as England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are being shaken and loosened up. There are things that we need to do and to pay attention to that will hold that fabric together. For example, I was pleased to see the Lord Speaker going to Northern Ireland and meeting people there—that is a helpful development, and I am sure that he will carry that forward; I have no doubt that he will take himself to Scotland before long, and I hope he goes to Wales as well.

It is because of this concern that I am also on the lookout for other things that can be done to help hold us together. When the Northern Ireland Assembly was being set up, it was extremely helpful to have people from Northern Ireland who were experienced in Westminster, in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, who understood what being a legislator was about. There were many others who had no experience in politics or, if they had experience, it was at local government level, which is a completely different exercise. I found myself doing quite a lot of work with some quite experienced councillors to help them realise that the exercise of executive responsibility in a council was very different from the exercise of legislative responsibility in a Parliament or Assembly.

Over a few years, people began to get concerned about what became called “double-jobbing”. In the early days, they did not have much concern about it; there were some people who were not just double-jobbing but triple-jobbing and more, and they had to be very busy in getting themselves about the place. The problem arose when people began to look at the pay being accumulated by some of those who were in more than one place. There was a lot of concern and anxiety and some anger about that, and it affected some electoral outcomes. So there was a move, as is very often the case in politics, to the other end of things and to saying, “We shouldn’t have any double-jobbing at all.” The result was legislation which meant that, at the drop of a hat—or, one might say, more like a guillotine, at the drop of a head—when someone was elected to another place, within eight days they lost their right to sit, initially in the House of Commons and then, much later, the House of Lords. Legislation was passed, and it goes quite considerably back, to make the practice impossible and there would be an eight-day period when the change would have to be made.

For many people it is not necessarily a huge problem, but it does seem to make it difficult for people to move from the Assembly to the House of Commons, to this place and indeed to Dáil Éireann, and for people in those other parliaments, such as Dáil Éireann and the House of Commons, to move back to the Assembly. This means that things are becoming siloed. It is not quite like that in Scotland, and even in Wales there is around a year’s leeway, so the problem is specific to Northern Ireland. Frankly, it is not very helpful. I understand why it has happened and I understand that things can be abused, but it has created a siloing of people into the Assembly, the Senedd and the Scottish Parliament, and away from Parliament here and indeed in Dublin.

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This is an important issue on which I am not, as I have indicated, unsympathetic. If the noble Lord is prepared to withdraw his amendment, I will undertake to go back and look at this further.

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the Minister. He is right, I did say that I was not going to stand over all aspects of the wording because it is quite a complex thing to get right. I referred to the Minister’s experience in Northern Ireland. That will have given him an insight into the kind of ingenuity of Northern Ireland politicians over the years to find ways around nearly everything that gets proposed. The whole notion of consent Motions has come back to us again, when, at the time that was drafted, we thought it was a very reasonable and appropriate thing—which it was, but it was not without potential loopholes.

I am more than happy to allow this to go back to the Minister and his officials for them to try to find their way through this technical maze. He is absolutely right about the intention and I am grateful to him for accepting it and for the spirit in which he is accepting it. I look forward to a redrafted amendment coming forward in the not-too-distant future. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 5 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will just say something briefly on Clause 4 and the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, and supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick. A civic forum sounds brilliant, does it not? But I am really not sure what we mean by a civic forum. I presume that this is a probing amendment, because clearly we could not support something where we have no real idea of how anyone would get on to it; who would be representing who; what the rules would be; whether they would get paid to come—would someone coming up from Londonderry/Derry get their fair pay?—or whether it would move around and people would be moving around with it.

I think this is one of those ideas that sound great but in practice would become just another group of people—mainly the same people, probably, who are already involved in politics in the wider sense in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is quite a small place, as those of us who come from there know, and everybody knows everybody, really. Wherever you go, people know somebody who knows somebody—probably sometimes they are even a relative. I am therefore not quite sure how this would work. We have, for example, a very strong Women’s Institute in Northern Ireland, where WI groups meet in the country areas regularly and do great work; we have the Young Farmers’ Clubs; we have all sorts of other organisations already, such as residents, tenants and community associations; and a huge amount of work is being done by churches and community groups. I am just not sure about introducing another layer of supposed democracy and accountability—I am not sure who it would be accountable to, anyway.

I hope that the Minister will treat this with great care, because it is one of those things that sounds good and could be set up, but then we discover that it is in fact pretty meaningless and does not do anything to move things forward in Northern Ireland.

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak on this, but I just want to pick up on some of the things that the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, has just said. We know exactly how such a thing would be established, because it was—it was running. When I was the Speaker, I met regularly with Chris Gibson, who was the chair of the Civic Forum, so this is not some kind of thing where we can say, “We’re really not sure what it is, how it will happen or where it would be”—it was operating. The puzzle is not whether it could operate, but why, as a part of the agreement that was voted on, it stopped operating.

There is an argument that it could have done more at the time. One of the discussions that I had with Chris Gibson as chair was to encourage him to take more initiative in enabling the forum to do things. My goodness, we sit in the House of Lords, which is in itself not entirely different from this proposition, which is that you have people who are not always involved directly and immediately in party politics but nevertheless have a role to play.

Therefore, I just flag up, after what the noble Baroness says about being puzzled as we do not know what it would be like or who would be appointed and so on, that it was in fact in place.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

That was 20 years ago.

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

Twenty years ago, indeed. The agreement itself, which is the basis for the Assembly, from 20 years ago, was the basis for the Civic Forum as well. The puzzle is how it has been possible to talk about implementation of the agreement and not talk about something that was voted on and supported in a referendum. I just flag that up.

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords, Northern Ireland has nearly 500 councillors, 18 MPs, 90 MLAs and Members of the House of Lords. We would need another tier of advisers. I listened carefully to what the noble Lord said about knowing how the forum would operate because it has operated in the past. However, I suggest to noble Lords that we did not know how members were appointed because the same grouping of people seems to be appointed to whatever body is going to be thought of next. It never widens out to Johnny Citizen; it seems to be that same stratum of people.

At a time when we have no money for health, education, agriculture or roads—they are nothing but potholes; we cannot get tar and we cannot get them properly looked after—we would like to expend more money on having people travelling around the countryside on an extra body. I suggest to the Minister that now is not the time to be spending more money on another tier. Spending money on many of the things that the people of Northern Ireland are crying out for, whether that be education, health, agriculture or the environment, would be a better use of public finance.