Northern Ireland

Debate between Oliver Colvile and Laurence Robertson

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robertson]

I thank my hon. Friend for that powerful intervention. That point was also raised earlier, and I agree entirely. I have in fact taken the matter to the very top, in that I have said to Mr Gerry Adams and Mr Martin McGuinness that that is exactly what they should be doing. They should be coming here to argue their case. They travel to Westminster and hold meetings here in this building, but they will not come to the Chamber to discuss these issues. They are not serving the people of Northern Ireland very well by pursuing that abstentionist policy. Almost a third of the Province is unrepresented here in this Chamber, which is a tragedy for the people of Northern Ireland, regardless of whether they are republicans or Unionists.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

As a fellow member of the Northern Ireland Select Committee, I congratulate my hon. Friend on the way in which he chairs it. Does he agree that we have begun to make progress, in that Sinn Fein has started to attend some meetings of the Select Committee, including when we are in Belfast? We have opened a dialogue of some sort. We have much further to go, but that will be down to my hon. Friend’s activities as well.

[Mr Robertson]

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks. It is true that Sinn Fein has started to give formal evidence to the Select Committee, and I regard that as progress. Despite what I just said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley), I must point out that these things sometimes take a little while. There has been progress in that respect, as my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) says, and I hope that it will continue because I see it as a positive move. It is sensible for Sinn Fein to make that move, but there are still a number of steps that it will have to take.

I was talking about integrated education, and I am very keen on that concept. I attended a Church of England secondary school, and I am proud to have done so, but I must point out that Bolton in Lancashire is very different from West Belfast—as you will know, Mr Deputy Speaker—and presents very different challenges. I want to see a society in Northern Ireland in which peace walls are no longer required, and in which we stop counting and publishing the percentages of Catholics and Protestants in organisations. We need to reach a point at which that does not matter.

We must move towards a society in which, rather than segregating children almost at birth, we teach them to live together. That is the way to achieve a shared future, because a shared future involves sharing institutions and sharing lives. The peaceful future that we all want to build in Northern Ireland will not be secured through treaties or international agreements; it will be secured through changing hearts and minds. That is something that we must try to work towards.

I have mentioned the violence in Northern Ireland over the summer and at the end of last year. I was there during the marches in mid-July, and I witnessed many thousands of people celebrating their culture. There was not a single problem among all those thousands of people. Of course, as ever, the 0.1% did cause problems and, unfortunately, those are the pictures that get flashed across the world. The Select Committee visited America a few months ago, and the people we spoke to told us how disconcerting it was to see the pictures of the flag protests and of the problems relating to marches. We had to point out to them that the problems were due to that 0.1% of the people. Unfortunately, however, those pictures that are flashed across the world lose revenue for Northern Ireland. They lose us tourists and inward investment, and that cannot be right. Those acts of violence cannot be right, whether they are the result of political ambitions related to republicanism or loyalism or the result of pure thuggery, which I suggest some of them were.

Either way, we have to move forward and try to build a better Northern Ireland, so that this generation and future generations do not suffer as those in the past have done, in the ways that my right hon. Friend the Member for Lagan Valley so graphically described earlier. To summarise, perhaps we can best deal with the past only by building a better future.