Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, we all know that language and politics are frequently bound up, even in some of the strangest places. I recently discovered that even the small and relatively homogenous country of Norway, when it became independent from Sweden in the early 20th century, fell immediately into a long and furious row about what the written version of Norwegian should be. For historical reasons, the language of administration in Norway had been Danish until that point. Two candidates presented themselves, both somewhat artificial—a Norwegianised version of Danish or a sort of mélange of Norwegian dialects from different parts of the country. As far as I know, this remains unresolved and two versions of written Norwegian still exist—so even there, there is no consensus.

It is obviously a privilege to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Belmont, but it is truly intimidating to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Bew, with the knowledge he showed of language—the Irish language in particular and its use north and south of the border. I was going to start by making a few comments that will sound quite domestic and jejune compared with what we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Bew, from my own experience.

My mother’s family has been on the west coast of County Clare for the best part of at least 200 years. While I am sure in the early to mid-19th century they would have spoken or been able to speak Irish, certainly by the late 19th century that had largely gone. My grandmother, whom I remember well, was born in the 1880s and had no Irish at all. Later, of course, it became a mandatory school subject, which ensured that absolutely nobody spoke it, because it was both hated as an imposition and badly taught.

So you can wander around County Clare and not find any Irish at all whereas, if you cross the Shannon estuary and go over to County Kerry, part of the Gaeltacht is there—an area of preserved Irish language, which has taken the concept so far that, a few years ago, they started to prohibit road signs and directions from appearing in English. Noble Lords will understand that, in the greater part of the Republic of Ireland, road signs are in both English and Irish, but there is no English down there on the Dingle peninsula. Of course, the Dingle peninsula is one of the most famous and important Irish tourist attractions, but it is now absolutely impossible to read the words “Dingle peninsula” on a road sign and the Irish—I am not going to attempt to pronounce it—bears no comparison or relationship with the words “Dingle” or “peninsula” in the way it is either written or spoken.

So one ends up with a degree of absurdity, but this is common in areas where language is sensitive. None the less—this was the crucial point that the noble Lord, Lord Bew, made—the sting has been taken out of all of it. Shopkeepers and the tourist industry get annoyed about the absence of road signs in Kerry. In County Clare, around where we are in Liscannor Bay, the biggest annoyance is that some bureaucratic zealot up in Dublin keeps sending down road signs changing the customary spelling of the village of Lahinch to Lehinch, which is the Dublin-approved way of spelling it. We will not have any of that, and these road signs are regularly amended by spontaneous night-time activity so that the “a” is put back and the “e” is not there—and even then, I have to tell noble Lords that Lahinch is not the proper Irish name of the town, which is something quite different again.

But this is all managed. There is an element of civilised behaviour in all this. In Northern Ireland, sadly, the question of language is still more political and weaponised. There are genuine concerns: you might lose your way in County Kerry but you will not lose your job because of the language you speak, and nor will you lose your identity. These issues are real. I do not claim a great qualification in entering into them, because what I want to move on to talk about, rather more seriously and less anecdotally, is the question of the Good Friday agreement itself.

Since the Good Friday agreement was entered into, I have always regarded it as not only an international agreement and a compact between communities but, if you like, a foundational constitutional document for the devolved Government of Northern Ireland on the basis of consent in a constrained and managed but none the less democratic framework based on community consent. As other noble Lords have said, the crucial thing is that the whole question of identity and language rights, and their legal basis, are rooted in the Good Friday agreement—no Good Friday agreement, no language rights, no rights to identity.

So it behoves everybody participating in this debate, on the Front and Back Benches, to put the protection of the Good Friday agreement right at the top of their agenda, because everything flows from it. My question is: are we doing that? I do not think we are. We are not protecting the Good Friday agreement; we are undermining it in a number of ways.

The first is that it cannot be the case, with this Bill and other legislation we have passed, including the imposition of abortion—a devolved matter—on Northern Ireland without the consent or agreement of the Executive and the Assembly, that we are strengthening the Good Friday agreement. It can only be the case that we are weakening it if, every time a difficult matter comes up that local communities or their political leaders do not wish to face in the context of the structures they have agreed to, it is taken away—I am not disputing the lawfulness of doing so—by the Government and passed through this sovereign Parliament. We have to take the Good Friday agreement seriously as the basis of legislation. If we were doing this in relation to Scottish or Welsh devolution, the anxieties and upsetness, especially on opposite Benches but all around the House, would be very serious. We are in danger of turning this into something routine and in doing so we undermine the Good Friday agreement.

The second way in which it is being undermined—the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Belmont, referred to this—is through the existence and operation of the Northern Ireland protocol. Now, one can have an argument about whether checks in the Irish Sea are doing damage, what sort of damage and what quantum of damage—both to the economy, in material terms, and to the identity of the unionist community in, so to speak, psychological terms—but there is one way in which it is definitely doing damage to the Good Friday agreement: legally, it has effectively displaced the Good Friday agreement as the foundational constitutional document, because it takes priority over it.

Every time there is a conflict between the Good Friday agreement and the Northern Ireland protocol, the Northern Ireland protocol comes first. We know that, first of all, because we legislated to amend the consent mechanism in the Good Friday agreement to allow the Northern Ireland protocol to be agreed in the first place. We did that here in this Parliament; I was not a Member of your Lordships’ House at the time. It has the legal effect that the Good Friday agreement remains, if you like, the foundational constitutional document except when it has to give way to the Northern Ireland protocol. In other words, the Northern Ireland protocol takes priority and is replacing it as the fundamental document on which the country is governed.

The second way in which the Northern Ireland protocol affects this is that this is all happening without any consent—not even consent under one mechanism or another. No consent mechanism has been tested in Northern Ireland for the imposition of this agreement upon it. There will be a mechanism and means of testing it in the course of next year and subsequently, but none the less the offence of introducing it and forcing people to live under it without any consent cannot be easily remedied and explains why the Good Friday agreement is not being supported in the way we would want by so many communities at the moment.

It goes further, because it is not merely the Northern Ireland protocol that has been imposed without consent. Periodically, amendments to existing European Union laws that are issued by Brussels have direct effect in Northern Ireland, although the people of Northern Ireland have no say in the democratic institutions that in other ways operate as a check and a mechanism for controlling those legal changes. This is a form of living under law that nobody in the Irish Republic would accept for themselves. Indeed, it would be wholly incompatible with its constitution, but we expect the people of Northern Ireland to live in this fashion. It really is quite infamous.

While the Bill sets up commissioners for the Irish and Ulster Scots languages, I am increasingly of the view that we actually need a commissioner for the protection of the Good Friday agreement. I look around and wonder who is actually speaking for the Good Friday agreement and its primacy. If we do not keep that at the forefront of our minds, as I have said, we will lose that agreement and all these rights, and this whole business of identity and language, which is so important to so many people, will be thrown back into a flux.