My Lords, it is always a tremendous pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dodds—I have been doing so for 20 years. I do not always agree with him but we agree on lots of things, and I agreed with much of what he said this evening: there is a special difference between dealing with these issues about Northern Ireland and dealing with things generally in the Bill.
The proposal by the Government is daft and it could be dangerous, and it is also utterly unnecessary. It has clearly been drawn up by people who know nothing about Northern Ireland—that is the difficulty. If only the architects of this proposal had talked to the Governments in Belfast or Dublin, or even to the Northern Ireland Office. And I absolutely agree, with great respect to the Minister who is winding up, that it should have been the noble Lord, Lord Caine, doing so—he is the one who knows a huge amount about Northern Ireland and presumably he would have been able to answer these questions with the experience of someone who has spent many years dealing with these issues.
The practical problems have been outlined well by my noble friends, such as the problem with tourism. One of the very first north-south bodies to be established was an all-Ireland tourist body. People come from all over the world to Ireland and want to see both ends. To impose this unnecessary restriction on them will jeopardise an industry that has been severely hit because of Covid over the last number of years. There are thousands of Lithuanians working in the Republic of Ireland, and probably a number in Northern Ireland, whose lives could easily be overturned by this—particularly those who work near the border, of course. They rely on common health facilities, as well as common shopping facilities.
As the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, and my noble friends have said, the border does not exist in the ordinary sense. It is not like a border anywhere else. One of the
great issues which has been ignored in drawing up this silly proposal is that it ignores entirely what has been agreed for the last quarter of a century. In drawing up the Good Friday agreement, in which I played some part a long time ago, we believed that the border was crucial to the success of our talks. The border has hundreds of crossings; there is no apparatus checking on people going back and forth. The principle lying behind that lack of the border being a border, if you see what I mean, and the fact that it is invisible in many ways, was an integral part of the agreement. I shall not talk this evening about the protocol but that is another disaster, in the sense that it has caused difficulties in Northern Ireland, and we will come to it on another occasion. The resolution on the border was a hugely important and significant factor in the success of the Good Friday agreement, and this provision strikes at the heart of it.
The problem is not simply what is in this particular proposal—it is how the proposal was arrived at, how it was structured, and how people drew it up. That has been disastrous, because it has been done with no knowledge of how it could affect the Good Friday agreement or future proposals on the border itself.
The relations between the Republic of Ireland and our Government are at rock bottom at the moment, and this does not help; it makes it worse—and I bet your bottom dollar that there have been no real discussions between the two Governments, in the way that there should be.
This should be dealt with in the British–Irish Intergovernmental Conference—the agreement set that up. The noble Lord, Lord Dodds referred to strand 3 of the agreement—that is to say, the relationship between east and west. I chaired the talks, along with the Irish Minister, on setting that up, and one result of it was the British–Irish Intergovernmental Conference: a body including both Governments to deal with tricky issues. If this is not a tricky issue, I do not know what is. I bet your bottom dollar, too, that there has not been much discussion with the parties in Northern Ireland either, or with the Northern Ireland Executive or the Northern Ireland Assembly. No—it is a disaster.
The sooner that this provision is removed from this Bill, the better. I doubt that the Government will do it but, if they do not, it will just fall into a pattern, whereby Northern Ireland is put on the side and seen as a peripheral business. It will come back to bite them, and I urge the Government to withdraw the provision or accept this amendment.
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