Northern Ireland

Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Donaldson]

I concur entirely with the hon. Lady’s remarks. She can be assured that that issue will be raised on another day in the House of Commons.

On the same day that the IRA commemoration took place in Castlederg, 11 August, there was a memorial service in Omagh to commemorate the Omagh bombing of August 1998, in which 29 innocent people lost their lives. Sinn Fein members were present at that event in Omagh. I pose a simple question: how can the same party, on the same day, in the same county engage in an act of glorification of terrorism in one town and stand alongside the victims of a similar atrocity in another town, and claim that there is no double standard?

[Dr William McCrea (South Antrim) (DUP)]

For 14 years, I represented Omagh and Castlederg in the House of Commons. Sinn Fein have a twisted mentality that means that they can easily do that, because they were not associated with the Omagh bomb and they close their minds to all the other bombings, including Teebane and the many other atrocities across the Province.

[Mr Donaldson]

I thank my hon. Friend for those words. I pay tribute to the way in which he has represented people in Northern Ireland over many years. The personal cost that he and his family have borne for that representation is often overlooked. He is absolutely correct.

We cannot equivocate on this matter. The finger would be pointed in our direction if we sought to justify an act of terrorism by one paramilitary organisation in Northern Ireland while condemning the same kind of action by another paramilitary organisation. The two bombers whom Sinn Fein commemorated in Castlederg were transporting a bomb that was designed to murder innocent people in a country town. The people whom they condemned in Omagh on the same day were doing the same thing: they transported a bomb into the heart of a town in the same county of Tyrone and it was designed to murder innocent people. What happened in Castlederg and what happened in Omagh must be condemned equally. It is time that Sinn Fein grew up and recognised that wrong is wrong, no matter who the perpetrator. There can be no rewriting of the history of the troubles in Northern Ireland.

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[Dr William McCrea (South Antrim) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to see you occupy the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I wish you great wisdom as you give leadership to the House.

I thank my colleagues for tabling the motion at a time when many of our fellow citizens are gathering with my right hon. Friend the Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) to remember the tragedy of the Shankill bombing 20 years ago today. On that day, many innocent lives were lost because of the atrocity committed by the Provisional IRA.

I acknowledge that Dr Richard Haass and Professor Meghan O’Sullivan have been given the task of seeking a way forward on a number of important issues that have divided our community for years, and I know that the House wishes them well in their endeavours. Today, however, my colleagues and I believe that there are issues that cannot be airbrushed out of existence, as some would wish, as if they had never happened. Nor must we let Sinn Fein and its republican fellow travellers rewrite the narrative of our troubled past in Northern Ireland.

I pay tribute to the thousands of men and women who donned the uniform and stood in the gap between community and anarchy throughout the long years of IRA terror. Those soldiers who patrolled the roads of Ulster over the years, alongside the RUC/RUCR, GC, USC, UDR and RIR, did so with valour and distinction. They rightly deserve our deep gratitude, having faced gangsters and thugs who reigned over 30 years of terror on a law-abiding population. We must never forget the sacrifice of our security forces and their bravery. We must also never forget the sacrifice of their families—mothers and fathers, sons and daughters—who anxiously waited, hoping that their loved ones would return home safely—alas, many of them did not.

The deep sense of loss still felt in the hearts of many innocent victims of violence across our Province today is raw, and no one except those who have walked this dark and lonely path can understand the pain. But this anguish has been made worse by the coat-trailing exercises of the republican movement, and Sinn Fein in particular, over recent months. The leader of my party has on many occasions gone out on a limb, seeking to reach the hand of friendship to nationalists and republicans in an effort to build a stronger community spirit and give the generations to come a better future and a prosperous Province of which we can all be proud. But, sadly, many Sinn Fein representatives just cannot leave their failed past, while others pretend they have—that is, of course, until the mask slips. Yes, some politicians speak piously of a shared future, but in reality the proof is that they cannot bear to see Orange feet walk the Queen’s highway. They cannot even share a road in Belfast or Portadown for a few minutes to allow a small contingent of Orangemen to walk home after a day when Protestants celebrate their culture. The reality is that when we scrape beneath the surface, we find that the old leopard has not changed his spots.

As Mr Robinson sought to build a peaceful future, Sinn Fein representatives such as Gerry Kelly defied the law by hanging on to police Land Rovers in north Belfast, and on another occasion, they celebrated the escape from the Maze prison, in which a prison officer was murdered. Sinn Fein coat-trailed through Castlederg and north Belfast, lauding as heroes those who blew themselves up with their own bombs, leaving a trail of innocent blood across the Province. Today people gather to remember the slaughter of the innocent on the Shankill, but no world attention will be focused on this event of course: they were only Protestants—innocent men, women and children, slaughtered by the blatantly sectarian IRA.

In reality, the authorities here on the mainland, as well as international Governments, have granted favoured status to those who murdered and maimed, while the law-abiding people of Northern Ireland were left to suffer and then told simply to move on. The Prime Minister made an apology to the families in Londonderry. The media spent hours of air time propagating one single event in the history of our Province just as if no one else had endured any injustice over the years of turmoil and trouble. No apology has been given to the law-abiding Unionist majority for the years they were plagued with IRA terrorism. I have no doubt that our security forces were well able to crush these terrorists, but political expedience would not allow them to do so. We are expected, and were expected, to suffer in silence, while world leaders kowtowed to, and wined and dined, Adams and McGuinness. Over the years, I have wept and comforted many families of innocent victims, and I carry in my heart deep wounds because of what the IRA has done. However, if we allow hatred and bitterness to take over our lives, we destroy ourselves and allow the enemy a victory over us.

The IRA were terrorists, formed as an organisation with the aim of removing the British from Northern Ireland and bringing about the unification of Ireland by force. They were doomed to fail, not because the Governments of the day stood up for the rights of the people, but because tens of thousands of ordinary people were determined to remain part of the United Kingdom and exercised their democratic right accordingly. Do not forget that Ministers from the Fianna Fail governing party in the Irish Republic diverted funds intended as emergency aid illegally to import weapons directly for the provos. Surely it is time for an unreserved apology from the Prime Minister of the Irish Republic for the actions of a former Government who helped to spawn and support IRA terrorist gangs. An apology from the Irish Republic’s Government would go some distance to assure the Unionist community that the pain of innocent victims of terror has been recognised. How long we will have to wait for such an apology, I do not know, but time will tell.

The Provisional IRA was responsible for the deaths of 1,706 people up to 2001. Of those, 497 were civilian casualties, 183 were members of the UDR, 455 came from regiments of the British Army and 271 were members of the RUC. Of its victims, 340 were Northern Ireland Roman Catholics, 794 were Northern Ireland Protestants, and 572 were not from Northern Ireland. The university of Ulster also states that the IRA lost 276 members during the troubles. However, in 132 of those cases, IRA members either caused their own deaths as a result of hunger strikes, premature bombing accidents and so on, or were murdered due to allegations of having worked for the security forces.

Let me put the record straight in the House. The IRA was not fighting a just war, but through bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, punishment beatings of civilians, torture, extortion, robberies, racketeering and so on, it forced successive British Governments into endless concessions. Those who were involved in terrorism should be called terrorists and must not be granted a similar status to those they terrorised, irrespective of what part of the community they come from. The IRA terrorist made a deliberate choice to join a terrorist organisation. Their victims and the families are worthy of justice, but their chance of getting that seems small. If the IRA claims it was a war, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Martin Ferris whom, on 20 February 2005, the then Justice Minister of the Irish Republic, Mr Michael McDowell, publicly named as members of the IRA army council, should be hauled before the war crimes tribunal for their acts of brutal crimes against humanity.

Some suggest that a truth commission should be enough to satisfy the innocent victims, but what would that achieve? When asked about his terrorist past, Gerry Adams looked into the camera and quietly, brazenly denied that he had ever been in the IRA. Martin McGuinness was exposed by the report into the events in Londonderry, but he told the Saville inquiry:

“I wish to make it clear that I will not provide the Inquiry with the identities of other members of the IRA on 30th January 1972 or confirm the roles played by such persons whose names are written down and shown to me...As a Republican I am simply not prepared to give such information.”

Yet that same person had the audacity and the cheek to welcome the £192 million report into Bloody Sunday pointing the finger at soldiers while dismissing the findings of the same report in regard to his being identified as having a submachine gun in Londonderry. Now they talk about prosecuting soldiers who put their necks on the line to preserve life in Northern Ireland, yet those others are lauded and applauded worldwide.

There will be no films or documentaries made about the Shankill bomb, even though there have been bloody Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays that must never be forgotten by this House. We must ask: why did the innocent have to die on Ulster soil? Was it because there was an acceptable level of violence, as was said, or because, as a previous Prime Minister said, his Government had no strategic interest in Northern Ireland?

We need closure, but we must not allow republicans to rewrite history or romanticise their murderous campaign. No one can understand the nightmare that the people of Northern Ireland have been through. They were terrorised in their kitchens and bedrooms, while walking on the streets as they went to restaurants and hotels, or while worshiping in their churches. They left their children in the morning not knowing whether they would ever come home to see them again in the evening. We lived through that. It was reality. We need the truth; we need justice. No one should be too high or mighty to escape the rule of law.

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[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the DUP for the extremely well phrased motion, which covers everything that anyone who has been involved in Northern Ireland for many years sees as essential to the future. I feel a little like an interloper, but I think it important that somebody from the Labour party speaks, other than my hon. Friend the Member for Bury South (Mr Lewis).

I pay tribute to the previous Minister of State, the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), and the previous shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), both of whom I had the pleasure of being with at Northern Ireland football matches. I hope that the new shadow Secretary of State, the new Minister of State and, indeed, the Secretary of State will come to the next Northern Ireland international match, which will hopefully take place at the newly developed Windsor Park stadium. We will not talk about the results in the World cup.

Much has been said about the Eames-Bradley report. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee discussed that report and took evidence on it. As the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Mr Donaldson) said in his speech, Eames-Bradley could never have gone any further until the whole section on victims was changed. As he said, we cannot have a situation in which innocent victims are equated with perpetrators who die in the act of undertaking a killing or an atrocity.

I am sorry that so few Members from both sides of the House have been here to hear the very moving speeches of Members from all parts of the House, particularly those from the DUP and the SDLP, who have lived through what we are discussing. Those of us who are involved in Northern Ireland have observed it and have been there a lot, but they have lived through it. The speech of the hon. Member for South Antrim (Dr McCrea) encompassed so well the frustration, anger, despair and misery of the many people in Northern Ireland who feel that they have not received justice. We cannot have a proper look at the past or look to a brave new future until there is honesty and truth. Honesty and truth are not coming from Sinn Fein-IRA. Until those leaders are honest about what happened in the past, we will not move forward.

I welcome the honest statement from the SDLP about the decision of its councillors on the naming of the park, which it knows caused huge distress. It is important that the leader of the party was prepared to say what he said. I also welcome the U-turn from the DUP on the Maze. It would have been quite shocking if it had become a shrine to terrorists, so that visitors could have gone to the Titanic in the morning and to the shrine in the afternoon. I am delighted that that has been dropped. I just hope that Sinn Fein does not throw its toys out of the pram and that the proper development of the site can go ahead.

[Dr McCrea]

I assure the hon. Lady that she did not need to worry, because there was never going to be and there never will be a shrine at the Maze.

[Kate Hoey]

We are all very happy about that.

We have to recognise that there is a feeling among the pro-Union community in Northern Ireland that there has been an unevenness about the way in which we have investigated atrocities, particularly in relation to the huge amounts of money that were spent on the Bloody Sunday inquiry. That inquiry did produce a very good report and the Prime Minister made an excellent contribution in recognising that, but the idea that the PSNI will spent thousands and thousands—