Northern Ireland Protocol Bill

Debate between Lord Bew and Baroness Kennedy of Shaws

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

We are in political negotiations. Here is our problem; I have already explained it. When I tried to persuade the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, I said, “Just believe the British Government when they say that the Good Friday agreement is the dominant thing”. We can see now what has happened here. You only have to read the Dublin newspapers, to be frank, to realise what has had happened.

We cannot undo a negotiation that we lost. It is not the officials’ fault; the Prime Minister had lost an election and was desperate to get in and to make any kind of progress to justify her existence. You cannot undo this; I am not suggesting that it is possible. You lose, you lose—end of story, at one level. However, at another level, what it means is that the EU is committed to the Good Friday agreement, and it does not understand what it is committed to. You only have to read Michel Barnier’s memoirs to see that he has no idea about the importance of the east-west dimension and that his description of the north-south dimension is literally fantasy, which has been derisorily commented on in all sections of the Irish media.

We are bound into this agreement, but we cannot be bound into a fantasy. We have to unhook. We must have a good-faith negotiation in which we have to acknowledge the things that have gone wrong on our side and the EU has to acknowledge that the version of the Good Friday agreement it thought it had is not the real agreement. There is a strand three, for example, which talks about the importance of the east-west arrangements and so on. You can see how the original misunderstanding runs through all the texts and leads to the difficulties we are now in. To go back again to why I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Howard, we do not need to ask the EU to change its mandate. We need to ask it to understand its mandate. Its mandate is the agreement. It does not take long to read it, by the way. There is a strand three about the importance of east-west relations, although you would not know it from Michel Barnier’s memoirs. You would not know it, and you would not really know what the north-south relationship is either. So, that is one reason why this negotiation has some potential, because both sides have to come to terms with their errors in the past.

I conclude with one thing, because I have great respect for the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and what he said about Baroness Blood—as did the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie. However, we also have to remember what other former distinguished Labour Secretaries of State said in acknowledging this difficulty. The noble Lord, Lord Mandelson—who was deeply involved in saving this process—said last week that he accepts that the Good Friday agreement and the protocol do not sit easy together; the tension is there. The noble Lord, Lord Murphy, talked about this in this Chamber as long ago as 6 December 2018. Distinguished Labour Secretaries of State know that there is a problem. The existence of the problem was not really acknowledged by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, earlier this afternoon.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, in all this discussion, not enough is said about the horror of what was experienced in the years leading up to the Good Friday agreement. We are forgetting that. In the language of decency in the House of Lords, we are allowing ourselves to somehow not remember the full horror of that period. That horror was rooted in inequality, a lack of rights for certain people in the community, and a strong sense that the only way towards peace was to somehow protect the rights and equalities of people in Northern Ireland. You would not have got people to the table if there had not been a very honest discussion about the pain, loss and suffering that came out of those inequalities. I can say this as somebody who did more trials involving those Troubles than probably anybody in this House.