Treatment of Detainees

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Last, but certainly not least, I call Mr. Mark Durkan.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I thank the Prime Minister for acknowledging dimensions of this issue that the previous Government either denied or dithered about. Does he also accept, however, that not all of us can join in the canonisation of the security services, because many of us believe that they were complicit in some of worst crimes carried out by both loyalists and republicans in Northern Ireland? Can the Prime Minister address the peculiar sequence that now seems to be in front of us: mediation, compensation, then investigation by this inquiry—and then, presumably, adjudication and publication thereafter? Might that not be a self-frustrating sequence?

[The Prime Minister]

I hope that it is not. We have spent some time looking at this issue, trying to find the right way to deal with it, and we think that mediation, followed by the judge-led inquiry, is the right way to get to the bottom of it. On the hon. Gentleman’s point about the security services, I would ask him to take a wide view and look across the years, across the history and across what the security services do today—not just in Northern Ireland but right across our world—to help keep people in this country, and indeed in this House, safe. I think we should end on the note of paying tribute to those brave men and women—they are never known about, and some of them die in this cause and cannot be mourned properly by their families—and of thanking them for what they do on our behalf.