Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, I want to express my appreciation of the most reverend Primate for obtaining this debate and, perhaps more importantly, identifying reconciliation as the subject for our consideration. As the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, pointed out, we have reason to be grateful to the most reverend Primate, not just for the debate but for things he has said in other places, at other times, and for what he has done by way of leadership and example. He is and continues to be an important thought leader and a model for many young people. We appreciate that.

I have been struck by this whole debate. We still have some important contributions to hear, but it is a notable debate even in the annals of your Lordships’ House, which has had so many. There have been very moving contributions. I will remember for a long time the comments and feelings generated by, for example, the experiences of the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, as my noble friend Lord Campbell remarked—comments about the importance of culture and language, and his reference to identity, to which I shall return later. I recall the earnest reflectiveness of the noble Baroness, Lady Fall, the vigorous and thoughtful challenges from the noble Lords, Lord Balfe and Lord Griffiths, and the moving and personal intervention by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry. I could have mentioned many more contributions because almost every one had something important to commend it, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, raising culture, identity and heritage, which are very important and sometimes overlooked.

I am sure noble Lords will not be surprised that I found myself particularly identifying with some of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, particularly when he mentioned the assassination 35 years ago on 7 December 1983 of Edgar Graham. Edgar was a close friend of the noble Lord, Lord Trimble. They were both legal academics at Queen’s University together. As I participate in this debate in your Lordships’ House, I remember that I was chairman of the debating society and Edgar was its secretary at Ballymena Academy. There were many debates, not on red Benches but pupils’ desks, on important matters that drove things for us, not least the trouble in our own country.

That is the striking thing: when we speak about these kinds of things they are not mere academic reflections. They are about our experience as people. When we think about it, reconciliation is about the relationships of individual people, but, even more importantly, of communities. The noble Lord, Lord Trimble, will remember, as perhaps will other noble Lords, that repeatedly through the decades the term “peace, stability and reconciliation” was applied to many initiatives in Northern Ireland. Those three words were used because they did not mean exactly the same thing and did not all involve all the same players. It has been rightly remarked that there is a security dimension to bringing violent political conflict to an end. There is usually no military, policing or security solution, but there is a role for security, our Ministry of Defence and our defence forces. It is a very important one.

It is also true that there are economic elements to this. The Department for International Development is extremely important because of the economic and community development it can facilitate, but if it is not done at the right time, in the right way and with the right understanding it gets completely the wrong results. Lots of money was put into Northern Ireland before we had a political settlement and all it achieved was upwardly mobile provos. It just made for wealthier terrorists. That has happened in many other places as well, but when it is done in the context of a political settlement it can strengthen it, encourage the building of the communities and take us to a better place.

As the most reverend Primate pointed out, reconciliation is about the relationships of communities and peoples. That is not just about getting different people together in the same room without hitting each other, though that is sometimes a substantial achievement in itself. When you bring things and people and communities together, whether atoms, molecules and subatomic particles, or people, nations and states, into a stable relationship, new phenomena and new possibilities emerge that simply did not exist before. When you bring hydrogen and oxygen together in a particular way, you might know everything there is to know about hydrogen and oxygen, but you do not know anything about water until you see what has emerged from that relationship, which has new possibilities. When those new possibilities arise, what are they like? They are more creative, more flexible and less reflexive. They are more adaptable; they create new possibilities and opportunities. That is what we saw in our process at home.

Why? Because we discovered, not because we are smart but because after hundreds of years of failure we found a different way of looking at things and began to understand, that the trouble we had was about disturbed historical relationships between communities—between Protestants and Catholics and unionists and nationalists in the north; between north and south on the island; and between Britain and Ireland. It became possible to look at that in the context of a wider Europe that brought the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland together on the same day in 1973, so that Ministers, civil servants and others would engage with each other in—at that stage, still in the European project—a creative, thoughtful, adventurous, novel way that made new things possible. That was the example for us that showed that there were new possibilities and new ways of doing things.

Tragically, as I look at what is happening at the moment and some of the negotiations taking place, I think that if some of those involved, including those in Brussels, had been with us in Belfast 20 years ago, there would never have been a Good Friday agreement. They would have said, “This is not possible, this is not acceptable”. It often happens that institutions start by being creative, imaginative and flexible and then get concretised down to regulation and legislation, and then it becomes impossible to change things without revolution further down the line.

What became possible for us from this was understanding a different way of relating to each other as communities in Northern Ireland, between north and south and between Britain and Ireland. But there are some important things to understand about relationships. The first, of course, is that they are not linear phenomena. If I have a relationship with someone, it also involves their friends, their family and the others with whom they have relationships. Once I start relating with them, it will impact on their other relationships and on my other relationships in ways that are absolutely not predictable, because relationships are complex. You can often say that if I make this intervention, it will harm a relationship, but you cannot say that any specific intervention will build a relationship. It is a much more complex matter—not just complicated but complex.

The other thing about relationships is that they are not a one-way phenomenon; they can progress and they can regress. They can be built not just on good possibilities but bad experiences. One of the things about the European project is that it took coal and steel, which people in Europe had used to create weapons of war to destroy each other, and made that the basis of co-operation, with the European Coal and Steel Community. Ireland, particularly the north, had been one of the most contentious things in British politics over the generations, but bringing Britain and Ireland together to work on a peace process generated new kinds of relationships between Britain and Ireland, as well as between north and south and between people within Northern Ireland. That meant that when all sorts of things were happening, not just in Northern Ireland, it was possible for the British and Irish Governments to engage with each other and find new ways of doing things.

However, what I began to observe over time was that the Prime Minister would no longer immediately think, “I need to talk to the Taoiseach about this”. Other Ministers would no longer immediately reflect that, if they were going to deal with even a border issue or a security issue, their first port of call was to deal with colleagues in Dublin because we were partners in a very special, historic way. We had achieved a development beyond disturbed historical relationships and transformed them into a more reconciled relationship in which we could do business and work together.

Then I began to find that that was not happening. I also began to find that in Dublin, instead of saying, “Because of our relationship with London, we can be the bridge with the rest of Europe. We can take things forward in an exciting way”, the response of the Irish Government was, “We will stand with the other 27 against the Brexiteers in the UK”. What was happening was a return—a regression—to the old split. It is a long time since the creation of the slogan,

“England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity”.


The truth is, England’s difficulty is usually Ireland’s difficulty as well.

As we think about reconciliation and the bringing together of identities, we must finally understand that each of those identities, brought together in a reconciled relationship, has to be able to change, grow and develop. The great historic faith families have survived because they found a way of holding a degree of continuity with the past and engaging in a new way with the future. Our personalities are not made of concrete; nor is our culture. Symbols may be made of concrete but our culture is our developing way of being in the world as communities, and reconciliation is how we transform disturbed historical relationships into fruitful, creative and flexible ways to the future. The most reverend Primate has given us an opportunity to reflect on these things. I think we will reflect on them for a long time because of his intervention.