Terrorism Act 2000 (Video Recording with Sound of Interviews and Associated Code of Practice) (Northern Ireland) Order 2020

Lord Hain Excerpts

Friday 10th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, for his reassuring explanation and for his courtesy as a Minister, and I am more than happy to support this order.

In your Lordships’ House on Wednesday, I raised again the issue of the refusal—not the failure but the refusal—of the Northern Ireland Executive to fulfil their legal and moral obligations to implement the 2019 legislation to provide for modest payments for those terribly injured through no fault of their own during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Two years ago, some of these victims came to Westminster with the WAVE Injured Group because for 10 years they had got little more than tea and sympathy from Stormont. One made a particular impression on me. Paddy Cassidy was 28 when 50 years ago, a random gun attack by loyalist terrorists near his north Belfast home left him with severe spinal injuries. He spent a year in a wheelchair and later could walk only with the aid of calipers and crutches. When I met him he was in constant pain, and it was clear that coming from Belfast to London was a huge and draining effort for him. The fear that more than one of the WAVE Injured Group expressed to me on that occasion was that some of them would die before the pension they had been campaigning for for years came through. On Monday 22 June, exactly that happened to Paddy Cassidy. The Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act 2019, enacted by this Parliament and initiated in this House, required claims to be assessed and payments to be made from 29 May. Paddy Cassidy died a month later.

It is now getting towards two months’ delay. How many more among the hundreds of terribly injured victims eligible will also have to die before the Secretary of State sorts this out with the First and Deputy First Ministers and the law is implemented? I will keep asking until justice prevails. We owe it to Patricia, Paddy’s widow, to his sons Edward and Michael and to his daughter Patricia. We owe it to the memory of Paddy Cassidy. May he rest in peace.