Independent Monitoring Commission for Northern Ireland

Lord Trimble Excerpts

Wednesday 18th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trimble]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, on securing the debate. I also congratulate the four persons who have been commissioners of the Independent Monitoring Commission over the past seven years, and thank them for the excellent job they have done.

Perhaps I may be permitted some purely personal reflections. It was my colleagues and I, during my time as First Minister of Northern Ireland, who suggested to the Government that such a body should be created. We did this in more specific terms, saying that as we had an oversight commissioner for the police and one for the justice system, we should have one for paramilitarism. The proposal evolved somewhat after it was originally made. I am sorry to say that when we put it to the Government we encountered fierce resistance from the Northern Ireland Office. Indeed, I remember a very senior member of the Northern Ireland Office saying to me that he was not going to have some other person overseeing what he did. He was quite right to have that concern because, while one put the proposal in terms of having independent reportage and oversight of what paramilitaries were doing, the whole object of the proposal was to try to curb the behaviour of the Northern Ireland Office, which unfortunately at times was not satisfactory. Respect for the Northern Ireland Office hit bottom when a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, after a paramilitary murder, dismissed it as merely “internal housekeeping” by a paramilitary organisation. That sort of licence to murder was something that no government Minister should have been issuing. We were worried about the way in which the Northern Ireland Office would allow expediency and other political considerations to affect what should have been the administration of justice.

It took quite some time before the concept was formally announced in, I think, July 2002. A few months before, there was a crisis that resulted in the suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and I have always felt that if we had had this body in existence before then, we might very well have avoided that collapse and the consequent nearly five-year hiatus in the institutions in Northern Ireland. But it came, and it had a very positive effect.

I do not want to try to go over all the detail, but I must say that my eye was caught by a sentence on page 45. The Independent Monitoring Commission says that one of the tasks it set itself right at the outset was to deal with the ceasefire mentality, which in its view had,

“for too long been used to obscure and avoid the challenging implications of the Belfast Agreement: that there had to be a complete severance between politics and paramilitary activity, and that this could come about only if those paramilitaries ceased to act as such”.

I have to say that it was not just the ceasefire mentality that was used to obscure those implications; there were political parties working overtime trying to obscure them. I am thinking primarily of Sinn Fein and its allies, but it was quite shameful at the time that there were some unionists who supported that activity by Sinn Fein by assuring it that the republican paramilitaries were not under any obligation to decommission or to cease to exist at that time. Thankfully, they have changed their opinion, but it took some time before that happened.

In opening, the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, said that we still have a responsibility with regard to these matters, and that is right. She also mentioned the expenditure that we engaged in. I notice that the expenditure of the Independent Monitoring Commission averaged out at less than £1 million a year. I venture to suggest that very few million pounds have been spent in Northern Ireland so usefully and to such good purpose, and I do not think it would have caused any great difficulty for government expenditure if that had continued. It was—as I read this report, and obviously this is a matter of interpretation—largely at the instance of the British and Irish Governments that the commission was wound up. I regret that. I think there is still a valuable role that it could have taken. If we are now without that, it increases the responsibility on us to see that this matter is not forgotten. Speaking to me earlier, the noble Baroness said that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland said that he was going to make regular reports to Parliament on these matters. I hope that happens and that we in this House get an opportunity to receive and to repeat such reports and to scrutinise them effectively.