Northern Ireland (Ministerial Appointments and Regional Rates) Bill

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Ian Paisley

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 24th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robertson]

The right hon. Gentleman raises an important point, and it goes back to the point I was trying to make earlier: we either accept that we have to work with people we do not like and do not want to work with, or we do not, and if we do not accept that, there is no power sharing. It is as simple as that.

I am afraid it is a very good point that parties on both sides have had to work with people they do not want to work with. There are accusations about certain Members of the Assembly, and if they were in this place and we had to work very closely with them, maybe we would not like that either, but it has had to happen for the sake of devolution and the institutions.

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to draw our attention to some of the terrible crimes that have been committed. The shadow Minister has been questioned on the issue of citing crimes from across the board; I know that he very much condemns crimes wherever they come from.

The Select Committee is concluding its report into Libyan-sponsored IRA activity, and I was rereading the proposed document this morning. I will not go into the details as the Committee has not considered it, but in that draft report are many examples of IRA violence—of the way the IRA has torn lives apart. Rereading some of those things this morning in the car as I came down to Westminster served as a reminder of what has gone on in Northern Ireland and how unacceptable it was.

I do not want to get into the issue of the prosecution of the soldiers at this point as that strays from the central part of our debate, but of course one side in the conflict always referred to it as “the war.” They did so because that excused the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children. So one side had a “war” and the other side was expected to go by the book—or the yellow card, to be precise. That is a very unfair way of looking at this whole situation and the whole legacy issue.

[Ian Paisley]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way—and I do count him as a friend for the support that he has given to Northern Ireland over many years. Does he accept that the Bill before the House will tip the scales in favour of direct rule? Tonight, people in Ulster will be watching their televisions and learning that it will be this House that is setting their rates. For the past 10 years, that has been done in the Northern Ireland Assembly. If that balance is tipped, each piece of legislation that comes forward will make it harder and harder to get back to devolution.

[Mr Robertson]

My hon. Friend puts his finger on the problem. Yes, this is a slippery slope, but in some ways the Bill offers an opportunity for people to get together and re-form the Executive. It would allow that to happen. However, my hon. Friend is right. Indeed, it would probably not be the whole of this House that decided the rates; that would be done by the Secretary of State. With respect to him, that is the only way he could do this. This goes back to what I said about direct rule earlier. Hon. Members will not get a say on the details, whereas if these decisions were being taken in Northern Ireland, there would be much more involvement by local people. That would be far better.

I really hope that the Secretary of State will somehow be able to get the parties together in Northern Ireland so that we can avoid having Committees upstairs here running Northern Ireland, which would be most unsatisfactory. Whether he succeeds or not, we really need to look at the Belfast agreement and the legislation to see whether they need updating. I do not wish to undermine the principles of power sharing in any way, but we need to make an attempt to make it work. At the moment, it is not working. If it were, we would not be sitting here now and we would not have been in crisis 18 months ago. I do not want everything to be set up again, only to find that we are in crisis again after six or 12 months.

The shadow Secretary of State mentioned the petition of concern issue earlier. I, too, raised that matter, and I was told at the time that the parties were happy with the situation. That, and an awful lot of other issues, need to be looked at. We need to modernise and update the arrangements so that they can deal with the situation that we find ourselves in now, rather than the one that we were in 20 years ago. Without doubt, a lot of progress has been made in Northern Ireland. We cannot deny that, and we should not want to, but we have to get the political process right as well. If we do not, people will completely lose faith in it, and that would be in nobody’s interests.

Northern Ireland (Stormont Agreement and Implementation Plan) Bill

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Ian Paisley

Monday 22nd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

I just want to make a fairly brief intervention in this debate. Before I do so, Mr Deputy Speaker, I wonder whether you will allow me a few seconds to refer and pay tribute to my constituency assistant who died very suddenly a few days ago. His name was Mark Calway, and he worked for me for 14 years and took a particular interest in matters Northern Ireland—and indeed in matters the Republic of Ireland—helping me quite a bit with my work on the Select Committee and as co-chairman of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly. His death is a stunning shock, and my heart goes out to his parents, Brian and Maureen. I do hope it is in order for me to pay the greatest tribute to him possible today. All hon. Members know how much we depend on our staff, and when they are personal friends as well, such a loss, at the age of 49, is terrible. Thank you very much indeed, Mr Deputy Speaker.

May I pay tribute to the Secretary of State for the work she has done in getting us to this point? I know—or I think I know—how difficult things were back in September when it looked as though the institutions in Northern Ireland might collapse. I know how much work she put in—or I am guessing I know that. Her dedication was total. She was absolutely determined that the institutions would not collapse and that we would in fact find some degree of agreement and a solution that would enable us to move forward. The fact that we are here today demonstrates that she was successful in that, so I really do want to pay tribute to her—and her team—for the very hard work and extraordinarily long hours put into this.

Before I was Select Committee Chairman, I served as shadow Minister for about five years. During some of that time we dealt with an awful lot of legislation—statutory instruments—in Committee upstairs, taking major decisions on behalf of the Province and the people in Northern Ireland. On many of those occasions, at the beginning of my speeches I said how wrong and inappropriate it was to govern the Province in that way, yet we really did face the prospect of going back to the previous situation, and that worried and frightened me. It came about as a result of a couple of tragic murders in Northern Ireland and the linkage between them and people in the Assembly who were allegedly sympathetic to that kind of activity. I am very pleased that this Bill makes it clear that there is no place, either in this place or the Assembly in Northern Ireland, for people who hold those beliefs.

Many years ago we heard the famous and chilling statement that some people would proceed with the Armalite in one hand and the ballot box in the other. Those days are long gone, and anybody who tries to practise that or carry out politics in that way should be in prison, deprived of their liberty. There is no place in the Northern Ireland Assembly for that kind of people. We would not want to work on Committees in this House or anywhere else with people who by day are in the debating Chamber and at night are on the streets causing trouble and wreaking havoc. We would not accept it in this place, and it should not be accepted in Northern Ireland, so I am very pleased that the Bill paves the way for removing that kind of behaviour.

[Ian Paisley]

I appreciate the point the hon. Gentleman is making. Sometimes we do have to stop and pinch ourselves and recognise how far Northern Ireland has come in recent years. The point he is making about Northern Ireland politicians taking decisions about the needs of the people of Northern Ireland is emphasised today, as there have been something like 26 amendments on the Floor of the Northern Ireland Parliament today, being voted and consulted on and considered by Northern Ireland’s elected representatives. That shows that instead of decisions being taken in Committee Rooms here, they are being taken in Northern Ireland by the elected representatives on the Floor of the Assembly, and they are very prosperous and good decisions.

[Mr Robertson]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point, which emphasises far more strongly than I was able to the importance of the Assembly’s functioning. When we sat in Committee taking big decisions, the great problem was that by the nature of the arithmetic of this House, there were very few people on the Committee from Northern Ireland. The decisions were taken by people like me and many others from English constituencies, with very few representatives from Northern Ireland, so the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to make that point.

The most urgent priority was dealing with the paramilitary aspect, but there were other issues, which are dealt with in the Bill. One was the agreeing of the budgets. I have mentioned before what happens when there is power-sharing rather than the straight democratic system that we have in this House. We all know why we have that power-sharing, and it has brought people together, but there may be times when there has to be compromise in the way the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive do business. There may be times when politicians in the Assembly and the Executive take their stances, make their points and make their objections, but at the end of the day there has to be agreement; if not, and if there is an overuse of the petitions of concern—I accept that both sides have used them to excess—it is not going to be very helpful. If we cannot get agreement on important issues such as the budget, we face the rather dark prospect of the institutions collapsing, as we almost saw, and power being brought back to this House. That is not something I want to see.