Northern Ireland

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) has revealed that the shadow Secretary of State is consistent in his geographic flattery as he tours the various constituencies of Northern Ireland, and no doubt constituencies elsewhere as well. I join others in welcoming the debate and commending the terms of the motion and the way in which it has accommodated a range of contributions on such a number of issues.

Northern Ireland is in a much better place than it was. As Martin Luther King often said,

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability”.

It took real choices and commitments to bring about such change. It took people standing by some of those choices and commitments in helping to deliver a new beginning to politics and a new beginning to the British-Irish relationship––against the shrill opposition of many––and delivering on the new beginning to policing as well. One party said that it was not needed and another said that it would not happen. Those things had to be delivered so that we could move to the situation that we now have.

When we negotiated the Good Friday agreement, I made the point, in leading the referendum campaign for my party, that it would be a new covenant of honour between the two traditions in Ireland. It would recruit and respect the sense and source of legitimacy of both the Unionist and the nationalist traditions by requiring endorsement by a majority of people in Northern Ireland and by a majority of people in the island as a whole. We would have institutions that would earn and enjoy the allegiance of both traditions and would be legitimate in their eyes because they had respected and recruited their respective senses and sources of legitimacy. Many people doubted that at the time, but that is what we now have.

We now have a settled process, despite the turbulence and the issues we faced. During the first period of devolution, the First Minister and his Ministers were walking around with letters of resignation in their pockets, and we had other parties saying, “Jump out of the Executive now and we’ll jump out with you.” Of course there was instability, but it was not the result of inherent difficulties in the institutions themselves. The strains at that time were the result of difficulties outside the institutions relating to the various positions on decommissioning and reactions to policing changes and, especially, prisoner releases.

In particular, we had difficulties because the two Governments at the time, although guarantors of the agreement, decided that an inclusive process had given us an inclusive agreement but that the way to resolve difficulties of interpretation and implementation was to have an exclusive process focusing on Sinn Fein on the one hand and the Ulster Unionist party on the other. That brought us into a situation in which the institutions were not centre stage in relation to the peace process. The Governments acted as though the institutions were secondary to the peace process.

Thankfully, we are now in a situation in which even here we have a British Government saying clearly that devolution, where it has responsibility, needs to get its act together. I, for one, am glad that we do not have everyone running in and out of Downing street and going to their different party ATMs to try to get goodies and sweeties or whatever. We are being held to the level of our shared responsibility and we need to live up to it an awful lot more, as many Members have said.

I particularly welcome what the shadow Secretary of State said about there still being a need to address the past. I have quoted before the Russian proverb that says, “To dwell in the past is to lose an eye, but to forget the past is to lose both eyes.” We need to address the past properly. I point out to the shadow Secretary of State that if the previous Government had managed to get away with passing the Northern Ireland (Offences) Bill, which he tried whipping through in Committee and in this Chamber, we would be in no position to deal with the past. All sorts of people would have gone to the secret tribunal and got their indemnity certificates, so the only people who might have faced any question about the past would be the relatives of victims who dared speculate that somebody had received such an indemnity or about the crime for which they had received it, because the Bill provided that that was who would go to jail. It would be journalists reporting or speculating on that or victims saying it who would go to jail. It was a horrendous Bill. Thankfully, we created a situation in which Sinn Fein was forced to withdraw its support from what we dubbed the Hain-Adams Bill and it was subsequently dropped. That at least created the space in which we can address the past, and that is what we must do. We, as parties, must stop patronising victims on the one hand and ghettoising them on the other. We have to face up to the past fully, and not just for the victims, but for future generations.

Similarly, hon. Members have mentioned the whole question of flags, symbols and emblems. The hon. Member for Belfast East (Naomi Long) made a point that I have made in this Chamber before. As we arrive at 11 new councils, we must ensure that they are not faced with all sorts of difficulties about flags, emblems or even the very symbols of the councils themselves. Similarly, there will be issues about the naming of properties and sites in their areas and the renaming of older ones. Again, we need a common framework for dealing with those and setting mature and responsible standards, rather than being left in a situation of “what aboutery” in relation to things that go on in different council chambers.

In their own way, the two flags that are cherished by the two traditions in Northern Ireland are, at best, symbols of unity, yet they end up being used as visual aids for sectarianism in a deeply offensive way. Combating that requires political leadership. The Good Friday agreement committed us to providing that shared leadership, but the parties have never got around to delivering it. Similarly, the agreement committed us to a Bill of Rights. I believe that we must achieve progress on the Bill of Rights.

If we achieve a robust and articulate Bill of Rights, we might then see that parties need to rely less on the vetoes and negative features and protections built into the agreement. So long as people do not have the positive protection of a Bill of Rights to hold the Government and their different agencies and Departments to account, parties will rely on the agreement’s remaining negative provisions. I drafted some of them, including the designation paragraph, and I know why I did so—it was in the rules of the talks and had to be in the rules of the institutions that came out of those talks—but it was always our hope that some of those features would prove biodegradable as the environment changed and improved. I am glad that even Sinn Fein now seems to be talking about relaxing some of those provisions.