Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Lord Smith of Clifton Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Clifton]

I thank my noble friend Lord Shutt for introducing this important debate and I look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Macdonald. First, like so many other noble Lords, I believe that the tone, tenor and substance of the Prime Minister’s response to the Saville report were appropriate in every respect. I congratulate Mr Cameron on that. It helps to make for satisfactory closure, to use the current argot, and allows the political system in Northern Ireland to mature. The development of a more normal politics, and one that is appreciably less sectarian, is desperately overdue.

Secondly, we are all indebted to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, and his colleagues for producing such a detailed, meticulous and comprehensive analysis of the events of Bloody Sunday some 38 years ago. As so many noble Lords have said, such a report was necessary to redeem the reputation of United Kingdom justice and government more generally since the earlier and—as is now widely recognised—infamous Widgery report was published. That was a whitewash and a cover-up on an unprecedented scale. The widespread reaction against Widgery’s findings was, as Saville notes, totally counterproductive and acted as the best recruiting agent for the Provisional IRA. All future public inquiries should be compelled to take a crash course on the dangers, both immediate and longer term, of hasty fixes and fudges.

It was fitting, therefore, that it was a Conservative Prime Minister who responded to Saville in the way that he did because it was a Conservative PM, Edward Health, who set up the Widgery inquiry in the first place. Widgery was a stain on the United Kingdom judiciary. It placed a further and unnecessary strain on the judges in Northern Ireland, who were carrying out their duties under the most trying circumstances. I have known the last four Chief Justices of Northern Ireland, including the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, who is speaking in this debate, and have witnessed the impartiality and assiduity that they all brought to the exercise of their duties. That dedication survives and bodes well for the future constitutional development of Northern Ireland.

In welcoming the Saville report and the responses that it evoked, I believe that there remain two more general UK-wide considerations. The most worrying is the use of the British Army in peacekeeping operations, to which the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, referred. There are some successes, of course, of which we must be proud, but too many unacceptable outrages are still being perpetrated. The immediate reaction of the military is always to claim that lessons have been learnt—that was said after the publication of the Saville report—but the events in Derry 38 years ago were not dissimilar to what has happened more recently in Basra in Iraq and in Helmand province in Afghanistan. Basically, as the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, pointed out, the military are not adequately trained to carry out peacekeeping, which is essentially a police operation. I can only hope that in the defence review being undertaken much more provision for training the Army in police methods will be considered. It will be more important in the future than aircraft carriers. I ask my noble friend to reassure me on this point.

Furthermore, will my noble friend say whether there was any truth in Monday’s Guardian report that official archives illustrated that Ministry of Defence policy was to fully prosecute republican paramilitaries while being lenient on loyalist paramilitaries? That would resonate with one’s observations at the time and would be consistent with the woefully misleading findings of the Widgery report.

Finally, there is the question of cost, to which others have referred. Almost £200 million is as unbelievable as it is unacceptable. The problem lies in the fact that lawyers, both as barristers and as judges, have no experience of project management. In fact, throughout their careers, they are managed by their clerks. Only in the topmost positions in the judicial hierarchy are they called on to manage and that comes late in their careers. As has been said, the Ministry of Justice must attend to this problem of excessive costs. By way of a benchmark, I ask my noble friend what the budgetary spend of Derry City Council was in the past financial year. As others have said, we must find a solution. The Government must come forward on it because, if you are not going to have public inquiries or if you are going to truncate them severely, as seems likely, you must have some mechanism to deal with these sorts of issues as they arise, as they clearly will, not just in Northern Ireland but elsewhere where we deploy our Army. We must now all pray that Northern Ireland can progress and develop as a mature civil society and democratic polity.