Queen’s Speech

Lord Dannatt Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dannatt (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I have chosen to speak in today’s section of the debate on the humble Address rather than next week on defence, as I place the maintenance of the integrity of the union as the highest priority of all the issues confronting Her Majesty’s Government today.

Other noble Lords have spoken on the importance of the maintenance of the union between England and Scotland, but I wish to focus on Northern Ireland as an integral part of our United Kingdom. Apart from England, where I was born and live, Northern Ireland is the other part of the United Kingdom in which I have lived and worked for extended periods of my life. Self-evidently, I have not spent time in Ulster for fun but as a member of the British Army, seeking to secure the safety of the people of Northern Ireland and to secure that Province as an integral part of our United Kingdom.

With that objective in mind, it has been profoundly depressing to have heard both the outcome of the Ballymurphy inquests on Tuesday and the Government’s response to those judgments thus far. That it should have taken three months short of half a century for 10 families in Ballymurphy to be told definitively that their loved ones were not gunmen, as previously alleged, but innocent members of the community is nothing short of a scandal. Sadly, it is a scandal matched by the Government’s slow response to these inquest findings. Perhaps the Minister, in answering this debate, will explain why the Prime Minister felt unable to follow the example of Mr David Cameron in offering a full and unqualified apology in the House of Commons, as he did after the publication of the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday. To do so only in a telephone call to the First Minister and Deputy First Minister is just not good enough. Self-evidently, the 10 families were not on that call, although I am aware that the Prime Minister has now written to them.

If the objective of retaining Northern Ireland within our United Kingdom is the goal, we should look to the future, not the past. We should look for ways to ease tensions between communities and build trust. With that in mind, I believe that we can learn more from the collapse of the trial of soldiers A and C than we can from the Ballymurphy inquest and the calls for the soldiers concerned to stand trial. As the trial of soldiers A and C showed, information, recollections and statements made 30, 40 or nearly 50 years ago invariably constitute inadmissible evidence, which is why another way to seek the truth about unsolved deaths and attacks must be found. Of course the pursuit of truth leading to justice is an inalienable principle and no one is above the law, but where truth cannot be reached effectively through a criminal justice system due to a lack of admissible evidence for whatever reason there must be another way.

After several meetings with the former Attorney-General, Sir Geoffrey Cox, I believed that a process of questioning by investigators of potential witnesses to a death or a serious crime could be based on a presumption not to prosecute unless new and compelling evidence was produced. Such an arrangement could have benefited civilian and military personnel equally, and allowed families, as in Ballymurphy or in Bloody Sunday, to discover the truth and gain closure to their anguish. However, the flaw in this approach—certainly for veteran soldiers—is that, under the Good Friday agreement, the Westminster Attorney-General gave his prosecuting authority up to the Northern Ireland prosecuting authorities. In Northern Ireland, experience shows that there is a predisposition to test evidence in court even if it is thin, thus questioning with a presumption not to prosecute will not work.

I am therefore now drawn to the Northern Ireland Office’s preferred option of the introduction not of an amnesty but of a qualified statute of limitations. By this, the investigation into any alleged crimes—potentially committed by civilians and soldiers alike—that took place before the Good Friday agreement was signed in April 1998 should not be subject to prosecution. In this way, I believe that witnesses would be more open, the likelihood of reaching the truth would be increased and closure for families would be more likely to be achieved.

In a pure sense, this is far from ideal; indeed, I would describe it as the least worst option. However, it is better than a stalemate and a continuing cause of tension between communities and a cause of anxiety to military veterans. I am told that all parties in Northern Ireland are likely to oppose such a statute of limitations, but I believe that the Westminster Government must be robust on this issue. I am also told that the Dublin Government would oppose it, but I respectfully remind the Irish Government that this is exactly what they used on 7 November 1924 as the way to end the acrimony following the civil war of 1922-23 in Ireland immediately following independence. So there is a successful precedent.

Finally, it is to be welcomed that the future of Northern Ireland has returned in recent years from the streets to Stormont and from the bullet to the ballot box, but lingering legacy issues arising from the Troubles stand in the way of a better future. The least worst option of a qualified statute of limitations is one way to tackle this problem and let more truth increase the chance of reconciliation.