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

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, as always, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, and his staff for these reports. I could give my whole five minutes over entirely to paeans and panegyrics, to odes and oratorios, to acclamations and encomiums, but I have done it before, as have the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, so shall we just take it all as read? It is a great achievement to have balanced the orange/green, remain/leave and left/right tensions three-dimensionally.

I agree with the thrust of the report’s conclusion: the Windsor Framework makes a few things a bit better and in a smaller number of areas it makes things slightly worse than the status quo plus the grace periods. The report is really an example of the importance of compromise, cool-headed temperance and the ability to talk things through in detail. I hope the Grand Committee will forgive me if I extend that logic, especially given the timing of the reconciliation Bill that we have just debated, and look at what is happening in the Province in terms of compromise.

One of the rather beautiful and underreported facts during the Troubles was the extent to which both communities consistently rejected violence. There was a Northern Ireland Life and Times survey in 1998, at the time of the Belfast agreement, and 70% of people who supported a united Ireland had no sympathy with physical force terrorism; only 8% supported it. Come forward one generation and 69% of people in that community now agree with Michelle O’Neill when she says that there was no alternative to IRA violence. Of course, this is partly just the passage of time, the sanitising effect of not being there with the funerals and the body parts and the physical destruction, but it also says something alarming about the readiness to compromise, to let the other side feel that they can live with something, on which all our deliberations, the amended Windsor Framework and the Belfast agreement itself rest.

Do not get me wrong: there has been immense progress in those 25 years—I do not think anyone will disagree with that—such as the Belfast dockyards and the Titanic quarter. The Corn Market, which I remember as a dingy and dangerous place, is now as beautiful a piece of street architecture as you will find anywhere in these islands. The sectarian murals have become tourist attractions. I hope it goes without saying that all of that is desirable and to be praised, but it all rests ultimately on a willingness to, if you like, elevate process over outcome, to accept that sometimes you are going to lose and that sometimes the other side is going to win and that that is not a threat to your whole identity. This point has been historically aimed at unionists, and not always without reason. I was amused by Senator Mitchell’s recollection at the 25th anniversary of David Trimble having said to him “You need to understand about my lot that they will travel hours out of their way to take an insult”, and we have all met politicians like that, but it applies equally to both sides.

Let me put it like this: if I were chiefly motivated by wanting a 32-county state in Ireland—whether I were on either side of the border—I would do things very differently. I would engage with British people in Northern Ireland as Brits rather than as misguided Irish protestants. I would have done a lot of things differently: I would not have left the Commonwealth; I would not have had a different foreign policy in the wars; I would not have made the Irish language a requirement. Those are water under the bridge, but going forward now is about finding a compromise that both sides can live with. We are in a world where we have a general retreat from liberal democracy, a general rise of populism and a “winner takes all” attitude even in countries that are old and established democracies—these are alarming tendencies. If there is one thing that we in this Chamber can do, perhaps it is to spread our irenic influence and to encourage people that, in the Windsor Framework and in everything else, we are never going to get 100% of what we want. That is the essence of any functioning open society.