Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions) Bill

Lord Murphy of Torfaen Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 30th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kilclooney, particularly because of the important role that he played 20 years ago at the time of the Good Friday agreement.

The Opposition will not of course oppose the Bill. It is very important in clarifying the position of civil servants and allowing important and urgent decisions to be made, but it imposes on them quite a considerable personal burden. The shorter the time they have that burden, the better, because they are not elected. At the same time, the law will now clarify the position regarding planning application issues in Northern Ireland. It is important too that public appointments are made, because until now hugely significant appointments for the people of Northern Ireland have been frozen. That is obviously a part of the Bill that we very much support.

However, the thrust of the Bill is about the restoration of the Executive and the Assembly in Belfast. Although I say that we do not oppose the Government, we are not very happy about the situation with the current negotiations, or lack of them, which would lead to the restoration of the Assembly and Executive. It seems to me that there has been little urgency over the last months. It also seems that, by putting a final 10-month limit on the talks, we are in a sense accepting the principle of delay. That lack of urgency and the lack of an incentive to ensure that we have an Assembly and Executive up and running much more quickly than is envisaged by the terms of this Bill are disappointing.

Interestingly, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, made the point that, because local government is so limited in its powers in Northern Ireland, not only what a regional government do but what local government in England, Wales and Scotland do as well is without democratic accountability, and as a consequence huge strain is put on the Good Friday agreement and the agreements that followed it. It is not just about an Assembly and an Executive; it is about the north-south arrangements too, because they fall if the Assembly falls. The whole point of getting the two communities together over all those years was that you would balance on the one hand the importance of the north-south institutions, which are extremely important to the nationalists, and on the other hand the importance of devolution in Northern Ireland, as well as east-west relations—the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference has not met properly until recently. All these strands of the agreement went together. You could not pick and choose the ones that you liked; you had to accept them all. That is the problem today in Northern Ireland in getting those institutions up and running.

Sinn Féin makes a great deal of the fact that it believes that the principles of the Good Friday agreement, particularly with regard to equality and human rights, are not being carried out in Northern Ireland. However, the agreement has also been breached by the Assembly not meeting. If Sinn Féin does not go into the Assembly and causes it not to function, that breaches the agreement too, and that is an important part of the negotiations that will follow this legislation.

The DUP should acknowledge that the RHI scheme caused much scandal in Northern Ireland. It should also acknowledge that the issues that Sinn Féin is complaining about, particularly with regard to the Irish language, can be resolved. If 20 years ago the whole apparatus and structure of the agreement that we all admire had depended on one single issue—the Irish language—it would not have happened. Far more significant issues than that had to be resolved at the time, but there are other ways in which you can restore the Assembly and still deal with the Irish language. Why can there not be an independent commission to make recommendations on the language? Why cannot people from Northern Ireland go to Wales and Scotland to see how the language legislation operates there? There are ways and means that can be examined but they have not been examined over the last months and years and they urgently need to be dealt with. The trouble is that you cannot legislate for trust—it is built up over years.

In Northern Ireland there is always a reason why you should not establish the Assembly at this time or that time. People say, “Oh, we can’t do it because of Brexit”, or “Ah, it’s not Brexit at all; it’s the general election in the Republic that will stop it”. And if it is not that, perhaps the local government elections in Northern Ireland will be a barrier. If we had listened to those sorts of arguments over 20 years, nothing would have been done in Northern Ireland, because there are always obstacles in front of us. There has to be a greater sense of urgency, and these obstacles, important though they are, have to be seen as part of the bigger picture.

I am glad that at the beginning of this rather long but interesting debate the Minister indicated that there are to be talks about talks, as they are not talking about talks at the moment. When they do talk about talks, perhaps they should think about a more imaginative way of holding them. They should be much more intense. They should be proper all-party talks, structured in the way that we have seen in the past—not the odd meeting in a party office here and there but proper talks around the table with everybody involved. There should also be an independent chair or mediator. That has been talked about for months now but there has been no movement on it. We would not have had what we did unless it had been for George Mitchell and his colleagues, and there are people who can be called upon to do that job.

Frankly, the two Prime Ministers and the two Governments have to do a lot more in getting people involved in the talks. The Minister will know that when talks were held in the past, the Prime Ministers from Dublin and London spent day in and day out, week in and week out, and month in and month out working to bring the parties together. In my view, there is no evidence that the two Prime Ministers, in dealing with what is, after all, an international treaty between our two countries, are dealing with it as they could. I know that they have the problems of Brexit, which will overshadow things, but that is intertwined with the restoration. There are two sets of negotiations that affect Northern Ireland—one on Brexit and the border and the other on the restoration of the institutions—and both are getting nowhere. There has to be a greater intensity in the weeks ahead.

There is another way. Time after time we have had what you might call “away weeks” in which the parties are brought together—at St Andrews, for example, which worked, and at Leeds Castle, which did not—but I have seen no evidence of new thinking on this. I hope that the Bill will herald new thinking, new imagination and new ideas about how to bring this matter to an end. Otherwise, we will drift inexorably towards direct rule.

We have said it many times: if you establish direct rule, it is a devil of a job to get out of it again. I was a direct rule Minister for five years in total. I did not like it, and I have said that to your Lordships before. I did not want to take decisions on behalf of the people of Northern Ireland. It is for the people elected in Northern Ireland to do that job. However, with issues such as Clause 4 and so on, the longer this goes on, the greater the chance that this Parliament and this Government will have to take decisions for the people of Northern Ireland, and that would be a disaster for the people of Northern Ireland. It is not an ordinary Assembly like the ones in Edinburgh or Cardiff; it is different. It is an integral part of the peace process as well as the political process. We cannot go back to where we were. The only way is forward, and that, I hope, will start after this Bill is enacted.