I am also bound to remind the Secretary of State that it is 909 days today since Northern Ireland had proper governance. When the Secretary of State brought the original Bill before the House, 652 days had elapsed. I need to remind the House that this is not simply an absence of institutions; there is a vacuum of both politics and decision making that is unprecedented since the signing of the Good Friday agreement. It is unprecedented and very dangerous. It is dangerous for the credibility of the democratic institutions established under the Good Friday agreement.
The Secretary of State referred quite rightly to the brutal murder of Lyra McKee as one of the triggers that brought the parties back to the talks process, but it should not take the brutal murder of a young woman to impel people—be they the Secretary of State or parties in the Northern Ireland—to do their duty. The absence of power sharing is also directly dangerous. For individuals and communities, the absence of those decision-making
processes has meant things not being done, and as a result conditions are deteriorating for people across Northern Ireland.
The precedent in the past was very clear. The law is very clear. Where talks and elections have been unable to resolve a situation, succeeding Secretaries of State have brought in direct rule. This Secretary of State and her predecessor were not prepared to do that. I say to the Secretary of State, as she is entitled to say herself, that there has been a failure by the five parties—perhaps, more fairly, of the two parties, the DUP and Sinn Féin —to get round the table and make power sharing work over those 909 days, but she cannot absolve herself from her own responsibilities. Until the law was changed last October, there had been 651 days of drift, during which time decisions were not being made and there was simply no ambition to bring through that decision-making process. Serious decisions were not made because the Secretary of State and others shied away from the controversial decision-making process it involved.
The Secretary of State’s critics would say to her—and I do understand this—that one of the issues is the Prime Minister’s reliance on the votes of the Democratic Unionist party in the Chamber. A brutal and harsh reality is that if one of the parties in Northern Ireland has a very different status from the rest, that tips the balance. Another reality, however, is that this is not good legislation.