Northern Ireland Troubles Bill

Claire Hanna Excerpts

Committee of the whole House & 3rd reading
Tuesday 20th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[David Davis]

No, not on this point. I am nearly at the end. I have already been rebuked by the Chairman for going on.

What that soldier said is, I am afraid, consistent with what I saw. I have never appeared in an inquest, but I have appeared in a Diplock court in Northern Ireland. [Interruption.] Sorry, am I being heckled? I saw the same: the lawyers were interested in rewriting history. The IRA would welcome the restarting of the Loughgall inquest. They would view that as a victory in its own right, because it would allow them yet another attempt to rewrite the history of the troubles.

I will make an aside, which in a way goes back to the point made by the hon. Member for Foyle (Colum Eastwood), although it is the converse of it. One of the soldiers at Loughgall got the military medal. In my view, many of them should have done, but he got it for putting himself at extra risk to save civilians and to prevent the death of civilians. That tells us what we are dealing with in relation to British soldiers in Northern Ireland.

My last point is that this operation was approved in detail by the general officer commanding, Northern Ireland. I believe that it was approved in detail by the Secretary of State. It was reviewed by the Director of Public Prosecutions, with all of the information to hand—forensics, witnesses, the lot. We should remember that RUC people would not have been involved directly, but would have given witness statements. Do we want to run that through a circumstance where the evidence is degraded, where people’s memories have gone and where some have died? One of the individuals involved has dementia. Is that what we want to do, or do we want to do it properly, by dispassionate method, using an instrument that is designed for the process and that those on both sides of the House agree will work?

[Claire Hanna (Belfast South and Mid Down) (SDLP)]

I thank all those who have contributed to what has been a relatively constructive debate over the past two days. It is not lost on me that our work in this Chamber, and over the coming days in the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, is about the legacy of the troubles, paramilitary transition and a 1990s parading dispute, as if we did not have problems and challenges to deal with in the present day. The sad reality is that despite the seismic changes in our part of the world over the decades, the past is not the past; it infects and affects politics, policing and public services every day. That is why we need to get through it. Most of all, it affects victims and survivors who, through all the decades of change, have been told to wait while the rest of society is allowed to move on, and while the murders of their loved ones are justified, explained away or minimised.

The truth is that for three decades, the needs of those with most to hide have been prioritised, rather than the needs of those with most to heal. It is not the victims who have dragged this out; the lesson that has not been learned by some in this House is that we are still at this three decades on precisely because the information that families need has had to be clawed and prised out of the hands of those with most to hide. For those families and for the Social Democratic and Labour party, this legislation is not about being obsessed with the past. It is not about raking over what has gone on. It is fundamentally about the future and our ability to move forward together. That is why we make no apology for supporting this legislation or for trying to make it better.

I will address today’s clauses and schedules, and some of the amendments and arguments that have featured in the debate, including on the passage of time and the trope about vexatious investigations, and some statistics relating to those issues. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) rightly set out in powerful detail the healing power accessed by truth for the Hillsborough families and the meaning that that has had for them. Another fact that bears repeating is that tens of thousands of republican and loyalist prisoners went through the justice system for their terrible crimes—crimes that our party stood firmly against in the face of provocation and sectarian horrors from every direction. Nobody here is calling those people heroes. Imperfect as that justice was, it did take place. Those who wish to describe those people as heroes—none of whom are sitting on these Benches or anywhere else—are bolstered by the failure to show any sort of nuance, and by the blind defence of some of the most brutal killings of the troubles.

We understand the pride that many in this Chamber feel for the British Army. We understand that of the 300,000 men—mostly men—and women who served, the vast majority did go out to try to keep the peace and to serve. We also need to restate that the number who have been investigated is practically in single figures. We acknowledge that many of the soldiers were subjected to horrors. We acknowledge their pain and the interventions of many of their families who are seeking access to truth, the same as any other family, because that is what this is about—not lawfare and revisionism.

I have to ask people to be careful with their language, when they use terms like “IRA lawyers”. Do Members know what has happened to people in the past when they have been named in this Chamber as IRA lawyers? They were shot dead in front of their families. Can we have a little caution in some of the language we are using?

This Bill is about the healing power of information and the right of families to access it. That right was powerfully articulated not only in terms of the Hillsborough families, but in the report published last month into the murder of Rory O’Kelly, a founding member of our party. He was a decent man and a family man who represented the non-violent civil rights protesters. He was brutally murdered while attending a funeral in his hometown by the Provisional IRA, because of his belief in and his professional service to the rule of law. His case in the report, released last month with feedback from his family, gives some sense of the release and the comfort that families can find in investigations, even if, in that case, no prosecution follows. It should be read and understood by those who want to smear those who support this legislation as being republicans involved in IRA cheerleading.

We all know that prosecutions will not follow in most cases, but that certainly does not mean they should be off the table when the evidence leads that way. That brings me to the amendment that would design in a veto role for the Attorney General in London. That could undermine the processes we are legislating for today. Independence of the judiciary is a principle worth protecting in general, and especially in these scenarios. I appreciate that this is hard for many in this Chamber to hear, but the UK Government were not some neutral player. They were an active participant many times in our horrible conflict. How can families truly have confidence in in these processes when a veto belongs to a Government who they feel participated actively in the conflict and, on many occasions, covered up that information?

I also want to address some of the fairly wild and mind-bending interventions about the Republic of Ireland, and to welcome the co-operation that the Bill represents, up to and including some op-eds implying that it constitutes a move towards EU re-entry—a combination of some of the greatest hits that we hear in this Chamber. The fact is that the Stormont House agreement, signed in 2014, created the potential for the architecture that would make it possible to go through legacy processes and to capture some of the many themes and patterns that Members on both sides of the Committee have tried to highlight, and created possibilities for us to push back against some of the revisionism and counter-narratives that many of us oppose.