Northern Ireland Assembly Members Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. Perhaps I could suggest that there is an entirely different explanation for what has happened. I am sad to say that, through the actions of the Government, those parties that were supported until 1998, and which the population supported in a referendum to establish an agreement in Northern Ireland, were consistently—and sometimes, one is led to imagine, deliberately—undermined in order to change the balance of power in Northern Ireland and put it in the hands of those who had associations with the most difficult and despicable elements in our society. To walk away from this amendment would leave me—and, I believe, many in Northern Ireland—with the impression that the Government are determined to persist with building up those two despicable cabals to the detriment of the civil society that most people wish to see.