Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) Bill

As a Unionist who is proud to be British, I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay), who deserves to be heard in the House on Northern Ireland matters. He has always shown considerable interest in the subject, he takes the trouble to come to Northern Ireland—although I hope that it is not trouble—and he knows Northern Ireland and its people well. I agreed with the hon. Gentleman’s early comments about the advantages of devolution over direct rule. Few of us who live and work in Northern Ireland believe that the bunch of Ministers we have now could not be bettered by Northern Ireland Ministers doing the same job. Indeed, some of us believe that certain of their decisions were made in a way that would incite the people of Northern Ireland to want devolution back. Be that as it may, devolution is clearly preferable to direct rule—but my colleagues and I believe that it must be the right form of devolution, not just whatever is cobbled together and thrown at us. The road to where we are now has been a long one, more of a marathon than a sprint. While some will talk of deadlines, to my party the important thing is to ensure that the conditions are right rather than that they are secured quickly. I shall deal with the timetable issue shortly, but let me first point out that in 1998 an agreement was reached following deadlines given by George Mitchell, who was responsible for mediating and facilitating the talks. When he said that he would go home on the next flight unless an agreement was reached, people hurriedly reached an agreement. Hearing the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) lecture us about the imperfections of some aspects of the Bill, one would think that we had something akin to Utopia in 1998. In fact, it was such a bad deal—so bad were the structures—that it collapsed and collapsed and collapsed again, and we have had nothing remotely close to devolution in Northern Ireland since. It is clear that improvements could be made. My party knows that in 1998 we had people in Government representing an organisation that was still holding on to all its weaponry and was still involved in paramilitary activities. Even while its members were in Government, that organisation was still carrying out terrorist acts. It was continuing to engage in criminality unabated: it was probably the largest criminal empire in Europe.