Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill

Lord Rogan Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 29th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rogan (UUP)]

My Lords, I will be brief and make just some general points about the Bill this evening. I, too, warmly welcome the Minister to the Dispatch Box and congratulate him on his well-deserved appointment. We from Northern Ireland are very aware of and appreciate his commitment to Northern Ireland over some 30-odd years. He is well acquainted with the hostelries in Hillsborough. I cannot think of any previous Minister, either here in your Lordships’ House or in another place, who has taken up post in the Northern Ireland Office with such a deep understanding of the brief and the Province of Northern Ireland. I wish him every success in his new role.

I support the Bill before us today which is, of course, a consequence of the New Decade, New Approach deal. However, I find it disheartening that, more than 23 years after the Belfast agreement was signed, most of the Bill’s provisions are necessary. I well remember leaving Castle Buildings on Good Friday 1998 with a real sense of hope that, at long last, normal politics would be coming to Northern Ireland. Yes, everyone, certainly at a political level, appreciated that there would be teething problems. More people tragically lost their lives at the hands of terrorists—29 people died and 220 were injured in Omagh—just over four months after the agreement. Devolution itself was also suspended on several occasions in those early years when my noble friend Lord Trimble held the position of First Minister. But it was still hoped that serious political upheaval in Northern Ireland would soon join the Troubles in being consigned to history. Instead, we saw Sinn Féin/IRA collapse the Assembly in January 2020, depriving local people of devolved government for three full calendar years. For most of 2021, we have witnessed a never-ending series of threats from the DUP to bring down the institutions as a means of distracting from the fact that the Prime Minister had betrayed them on Brexit, including by imposing a loathsome regulatory border in the Irish Sea.

The vast majority of people in Northern Ireland want good government and want the Assembly to work. They have had enough of public skirmishes between Executive Ministers and the impression that too many decisions are made for party-political reasons rather than for the public good. I share the fear expressed by some, including my own party leader, Doug Beattie, that, should the institutions be brought down again in the coming months, they will not be coming back any time soon.

With the Assembly elections a little over five months away and with uncertainty growing over what Her Majesty’s Government and the European Union may or may not do in relation to the protocol, we can be sure that more choppy waters lie ahead for Northern Ireland. However, should the institutions survive these challenges, and if a new Executive and Assembly can be established next year after those elections, I hope that MLAs and Ministers will choose to concentrate their energies on working together to deliver for all communities in Northern Ireland, with no more stunts, no more walkouts and no more need for legislation such as the Bill before us tonight.

Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill

Lord Rogan Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 13th December 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

I shall speak briefly in favour of Amendment 3, to which I have added my name. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, spelled out, it would provide for the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister to be referred to as Joint First Ministers, reflecting their identical status, powers and responsibilities. I hesitate slightly to speak in too much detail on this amendment when there are quite so many noble Lords in the Room who were directly involved with the various negotiations, but it seems to me that the current terminology allows for a distortion of the reality. In reality, if the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister are entirely equal, can the Minister say what would be the disadvantage of passing this amendment or similar amendments? My honourable friend Stephen Farry said during the debate in the House of Commons when it passed this Bill that making this change would

“take the heat out of the fairly … meaningless contrast that is made and creates huge tension in our election campaigns.”—[Official Report, Commons, 26/10/21; col. 159.]

[Lord Rogan (UUP)]

I rise to support the amendment standing in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Empey. In common with my noble friend, I was there on Good Friday 1998 when the Belfast agreement was finalised. My role at that time was chair of the Ulster Unionist Party. My noble friend Lord Empey was our chief negotiator. He deserves much of the credit for that incredible achievement almost a quarter of a century ago.

It was not a perfect document—far from it. Negotiators from all parties involved in the talks, as well as the two Governments, had endless battles over the finer details of the agreement. Arguably, the biggest battles were around the release of terrorist prisoners, a concession that most unionists hated—we in the Ulster Unionist Party still do. However, the agreement was a compromise. We all had to make concessions that we would rather not have made. It was a delicate balancing act.

Every aspect of the Belfast agreement was critical to the final outcome, including the procedure by which the First Minister and Deputy First Minister were to be elected. The noble Lord, Lord Trimble, who I am pleased to see here today, and the late Seamus Mallon of the nationalist SDLP were the first holders of these posts. They were a joint ticket, elected by a cross-community vote of the Northern Ireland Assembly. That required the support of the majority of the MLAs—a majority of the designated unionist MLAs and of the designated nationalist MLAs. The endorsement of the Assembly, the elected representatives of the people, gave them their authority—the leaders of the unionists and the nationalists working together in the best interests of Northern Ireland as a whole. The noble Lord, Lord Trimble, would openly acknowledge that every day was not harmonious, but at important and often tragic moments, such as the horrific deaths of the Quinn brothers and the Omagh bomb, both in the summer of 1998, the First Minister and Deputy First Minister were able to stand shoulder to shoulder and speak on behalf of the country that they led.

However, all that changed following the St Andrews agreement in 2006. The Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) Act changed the process for appointing a First Minister and Deputy First Minister—and I ask noble Lords to note the word “appointed”, rather than “elected”. Since 2006, the First Minister had been nominated by the largest party overall and the Deputy First Minister by the largest party in the next largest community designation. The reasons for that change were entirely political. First, some MLAs wanted to be able to tell their supporters that they had no hand in electing a nationalist, whether they be from Sinn Féin/IRA or the SDLP, into office. Secondly, as the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, has stated, they wanted to be able to proclaim at every subsequent Assembly election campaign that failing to support them would allow a nationalist to become First Minister, despite the positions of First Minister and Deputy First Minister being a shared office. I am sorry to say that both those reasons are rooted in sectarianism. That is shameful but it is the stark reality.

The Belfast agreement, which the DUP had no hand in and refused to support, was supposed to be a means of ending sectarianism, with the matter of the election of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister a key element of that. Unlike the St Andrews agreement, the Belfast agreement was endorsed by the people and should not have been changed without their consent. The amendment standing in my name and that of my noble friend would restore a key element of the Belfast agreement and deserves your Lordships’ support.

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to the three amendments in this group. I shall start with the third of them, Amendment 4, which has been spoken to by the noble Lords, Lord Empey and Lord Rogan. They and the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, have talked about going back to, or resetting, the Good Friday agreement, which, as has just been pointed out, had the support of the people in a referendum—not something that happened subsequently—and there is great strength in that. The noble Lord also referred to the situation at the time, which was still overshadowed by the terrorist campaign.

For me, there were two issues about which I disagreed with Prime Minister Blair in the negotiation right up to the very last day. The first was that, in my view, decommissioning and the release of prisoners should have been related. I was quite prepared to go down the road of releasing of prisoners so long as the matériel that they had used and might use was decommissioned. The Prime Minister and the Taoiseach failed to achieve that agreement and all of us suffered for some years after that in addressing that question. That was why the IMC was established—I spent some years working on that.

The other issue was so-called parallel consent, which had actually emerged as a formula from the experience of South Africa, where it was not a formula but an understanding. It was always my view that to identify people as “unionists, nationalists and other” was a mistake, and to draw up an electoral formula based on that would make the situation more problematic. However, I had another proposal: a proposal for a majority of two-thirds—in other words, 67%. It was clear to me that no one party and no one part of the community could pass a piece of legislation if it had to get over two-thirds.

Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill

Lord Rogan Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 19th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I sympathise with what the noble Lord, Lord Empey, has said, and with the important words of the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie. However, the fate of Amendment 4 shows what happens when we try, late in the day, to inject new elements into this piece of rather specific technical legislation. The fate of Amendment 4 rather implies that, however desirable in principle this is—and I accept the point about the effective equality of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister—this is probably not the moment to try to move that ahead.

With respect for what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, it is forgotten in this House that, but for the DUP and the St Andrews agreement, we would not have had 10 or more years of stability in Northern Ireland. Those of us who do not like aspects of the St Andrews agreement, particularly around this point, must accept that as an important political reality. It is important to bear that in mind. However, as a footnote to what the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, said, the provision dealing with the election of First Minister and Deputy First Minister in the St Andrews agreement is not quite the agreement which the then Labour Government suggested at the time; it is not what was implemented in law.

The reason that I mention this is because I think it is possible—I almost said, looking at the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, “Your day will come”, but because of the implications of that phrase in Northern Ireland, I will not—that the day will come, perhaps not too far in the future, when we return to this point. I wanted to check with the Minister that the realities are that, if the Government do decide to return to this point at a later date, there is no forbidding aspect and nothing saying, “You can’t do that because it is in the Good Friday agreement or St Andrews agreement.” The Government would be free to act if this looked to be the only way out of a major crisis of the institutions.

[Lord Rogan (UUP)]

My Lords, I will confine my remarks to the amendments under discussion. As I did in Committee, I support the amendment standing in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Empey.

As your Lordships will be fully aware, this amendment would reinstate the original procedure by which First Ministers and Deputy First Ministers are elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly. Requiring MLAs to endorse the post holders was intended to give elected representatives buy-in to the process. It also empowered the First and Deputy First Ministers with the added authority that comes with their endorsement by a cross-community vote. The changes to these arrangements, carved up at St Andrews, were not good for democracy in 2006. As we head towards an Assembly election in three and a half months’ time, they are even less appealing to the people of Northern Ireland in 2022.

As my noble friend Lord Empey has said, in every Stormont election since the St Andrews deal was done, the DUP has sought to scare the Unionist people by claiming that a vote for anyone but them was a vote for Sinn Féin/IRA. My noble friend and I feel that it is time for that to end. Speaking in Committee, the Minister, with his characteristic frankness, said that he had sympathy for the amendment and the arguments of my noble friend. However, he added that there was not sufficient consensus to return to the old model of election. I would advance the precise same argument against the Government’s foolish attempt to use this Bill as a vehicle to reintroduce double-jobbing when only the DUP regards that as a good idea.

Should our amendment not be accepted today, I would hope that the Minister will commit in his response to keeping what it seeks to achieve high on his “to do” list, so that we can return to the issue after the new Northern Ireland Assembly is elected.

[Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)]

My Lords, I oppose Amendments 1 and 2. The Bill before us is simply designed to legislate for measures agreed under the New Decade, New Approach deal, not to undo previous commitments entered into at St Andrews. To try to go back in time would help only to undermine the fragile peace that presently exists in Northern Ireland.

As a unionist, I believe that the constitutional framework of our union should be strengthened, especially now, when the smooth functioning of the three devolved settlements is increasingly under attack. In specific circumstances, and during uncertain times, with the backdrop of an Irish sea border and threats to political stability in Northern Ireland, it would be foolish to return to what was clearly a failed system, used to appoint the First Minister and Deputy First Minister. Indeed, there was a lot of instability there. I find it difficult to understand the explanations from those noble Lords supporting the amendment. Therefore, I am afraid that I am forced to conclude that their support is based on petty political manoeuvring, which is clearly inappropriate at a time of increasing societal division and instability in Northern Ireland.