Justice and Northern Ireland

It is a great privilege to follow the right hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley) on what is an historic occasion. The tributes that have been paid, with the appropriate degree of caution about the future, bring to mind the history not only of the troubles, but of the role that the UK Parliament has played in such matters, going back to the earliest times of our Parliament. The degree of co-operation and good will that we have heard today is truly important, whichever side of the political or religious divide one has come from. However, those looking back through the annals of our history will want to consider the role played by this House and the battles conducted here. They include those involving Daniel O'Connell and John Bright, as well as the episodes during the 1880s involving Parnell, followed by the obstructionism and the violence that took place in this very Chamber. That led not merely to the suspension of Standing Orders, but to their being taken away from the Speaker and handed over to the Executive, an issue that we are yet to resolve. In addition, we then had the later period, with Carson, the Black and Tans, and the problems from 1918 through to the 1920s, and then again in more recent times, with the tremendous tensions that were built up. I follow the right hon. Member for North Antrim in his awareness of what has changed in this House, given the relative calm of this Chamber—in fact, the complete calm—compared with the ructions that were once stimulated by the great passions that reigned over the questions of Northern Ireland and home rule. They included the break-up leading to the creation of Liberal Unionism by Joe Chamberlain and John Bright on the question of home rule, which sometimes gets forgotten. I mentioned home rule in an intervention on the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), but these are momentous historic questions and huge constitutional issues. As the right hon. Member for North Antrim has said, we are here in this Chamber discussing the devolution of policing and justice, with the reservations that have been made and the acknowledgement that there is a sunset clause, although I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) modestly underestimated the role played by the Select Committee on Northern Ireland and the degree to which those policies were developed under the aegis of the UK Parliament. All I say by way of conclusion is that the Chamber may be relatively empty, but despite the ghosts of those who have taken part in these momentous occasions, with all the passions and the tumult in this House on the issues of Northern Ireland and Ireland as a whole, we have now moved so far that the right hon. Member for North Antrim was able to touch on his origins in this House and the passions that he induced, which he explained so clearly in his speech today. The transformation of the politics of Northern Ireland is not yet complete, but the bottom line is this: great progress has been made, and the one thing that one can say is that the beneficiaries are the people of Northern Ireland and our democratic system.