Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) (No. 2) Bill

My Lords, my party’s views in the debate will be expressed shortly by my noble friend Lord Glentoran, who has spent so much time on the Front Bench on our behalf in recent years and on these matters. My remarks will be brief and personal, and will dwell on the occasion and the fact of the Bill rather than its content and detail. But a decade and three-quarters of my life, or just under a quarter of my whole life, have been devoted to the issues of which this Bill is, at least at the moment, the culmination. I have done so either directly as Secretary or State, at an oblique distance as chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs, at a further distance still as a Back-Bench member of the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body or as an occasional attendee at the British Irish Association, most recently last year—quite apart from attendance in your Lordships’ House. Yesterday is too remarkable a development for a bystander to let it pass by on the other side. I feel that the more vividly since of the 15 Secretaries of States over the past 35 years, I believe I am the only one to have had a significant admixture of Ulster blood, in the proper provincial use of that geographical adjective. Like the Brookes of Fermanagh, my branch of the family also came from Cheshire and settled in Cavan, which was not a county in the Jamesian settlement, at about the same time as the Brookes of Fermanagh moved. The first MP out of six from my family to sit in this Parliament in the past 175 years was elected MP for Armagh at the election which immediately followed the Great Reform Bill. As I said once at a great Ulster Defence Regiment dinner, if my paternal great grandfather—one of three great grandparents to have been born in the Province—had not left his rope business in Belfast in the 19th century to help his sick business partner in Birkenhead, I might well have spent the early years of the Troubles serving in the UDR. But I suppose this historic infusion of blood did at least immunise me from the Whitehall charge of going native. Yesterday was a remarkable day. The same could not necessarily be said of all the stages over the past 17 or 20 years that led up to it, and things happened in that period which of course one would rather had not happened, but this is not the time certainly for a bystander to air recriminations. Those will be matters for historians to dissect. The purpose was to reach a democratic decision. In more ways than one, that has been achieved. The people have spoken and the politicians have listened. As the first Viscount Slim—and it is a pleasure to see the second Viscount, the noble Viscount, Lord Slim, in the Chamber tonight—says again and again in his remarkable book Defeat into Victory, no news is ever as good or as bad as it first appears. In the past 20 or, indeed, 30 years, his words have been a comfort in bad times, but they are just as true in good ones, and we have to seize the day, again in more ways than one. It is a matter of encouragement, at least to me, that in the days of the earlier Executive, at the departmental level—in other words, below the levelof the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, who will speak shortly, and to whom we continue to owe so much—the political commentators in the Province spoke most warmly of the discharge of departmental responsibilities by the honourable Members for Belfast East and Mid Ulster, with Mr Empey, as he then was, not far behind. We wish them well on behalf of all of us, and especially on behalf of the Province. I have never met Mr Adams. I hope that I shall not embarrass either the noble Baroness, Lady Paisley, or, indeed, the former Member for North Antrim, the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, if I say I have always had affection for him and confidence that in any ultimate test he would do the right thing for the Province. Of course reserved responsibilities remain with Her Majesty’s Government and this Parliament, and we shall remain vigilant. It is, however, best that devolved powers are exercised locally, rather than from hence, especially in the present configuration of the kingdom. It is also encouraging, in the context of the responsibilities that we exercise on behalf of the long-suffering taxpayers of Great Britain—they are sustaining a public sector in the Province, which is disproportionately dominant—that those aspects of Northern Ireland affairs which relate to health inthe private sector have not seen political objection in the Province since 1998 to the integration of the all-Ireland economy; indeed, particularly in taxterms, the opposite. I hope that, however great the temptation to mulct the British taxpayer, at least as much energy and imagination within the new Administration will go into expanding the private sector and towards the objective that the Province will achieve the self-respect of standing, in due course, on its own feet. That is quite enough from me, particularly if the Bill has to be through by midnight.