Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland: Follow-up Report (European Affairs Committee)

Lord Bew Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I commend the very impressive work of the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and his committee and its staff.

I will make a distinction between the two reports before us. The follow-up report, published on 27 July 2022, is actually the more impressive of the two. Pages 58 to 62 on medicines are absolutely on the button and I think played a benign role in the eventual resolution of the question of medicines in the Windsor Framework. On the other hand, the new and more recent document on the Windsor Framework inevitably must deal with matters of unfathomable complexity, massive technical difficulty and a huge number of known unknowns. It is beyond the wit of any committee, no matter how wise, to produce an accurate crystal ball in this area.

I labour under the disadvantage of being the only person in this debate, so far, to have read the Government’s 32-page reply in the last hour. It is gritty and tough-minded. On page 18, for example, it calls for the committee to come to terms with certain factual errors in the initial report. It is a serious response, probably more so than is often the case in replies to the work of our committees, at least in my experience. However, I acknowledge that the technical complexity of these issues is so great that some degree of weakness, compared with the second follow-up report, was almost inevitable.

There is important evidence from the Irish ambassador in the follow-up report of July 2022. I broadly support the position taken by the noble Lord, Lord Dodds; when the Irish ambassador is questioned by the committee about the Good Friday agreement, it is very clear in the series of replies he gives—although everything he says about the importance of minority rights in the Good Friday agreement is perfectly correct—that the east-west dimension, strand three of the agreement, disappears and that, characteristically, throughout the last three years and until very recently, if at all, Dublin has defined the east-west relationship as Dublin to London. It does not include Belfast and Northern Ireland. Its model for harmonious relationships was clearly totally incompatible with, for example, what Dublin put its name to in the withdrawal agreement launched by the May Government, which did not mention any role at all for the Northern Ireland Assembly. It is to the credit of the noble Lord, Lord Frost, that the agreement he produced, which is unpopular in many areas, makes a fundamental democratic transformation in returning the role of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Subsequently, the Windsor Framework was an attempt to deepen that relationship.

I mention the Irish Government because of another point that was also mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hannan: the tone of Irish nationalism at the moment, with the widespread singing of “Ooh ah up the Ra”. This is as important as any deliberation on the role of European law in making it difficult to get a return of Stormont. There are two problems. One is a certain glibness of tone by the Irish state itself, but the other is the popular culture, which is making it very difficult indeed. I am grateful to two people who were very important in 1998, Bertie Ahern and Rory Montgomery, a very important official on the Irish side, who have stood out against this crass, vulgar popular culture, which is more important than many of the technical difficulties in and around this report.

I absolutely accept that it is possible to accept the Government’s document completely, and even to say that the seven tests are completely met, and still not like the options for unionism on the grounds that European law continues to operate in Northern Ireland. What I want to say on this is quite simple: the union has always been impure. Dramatic examples include not having conscription in the Second World War and the failure of the Labour Party to organise in Northern Ireland. These are dramatic indications of the impurity of the union. None the less, it continues to survive and, on the latest polling from the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey, continues to have a solid basis ahead of it, but it is very important to understand that it is always evolving and that there will never be a union in accordance with the ideals of high unionism. Impurities—a role for European law is probably one for the future—are nothing new in the history of the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.