Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill

Committee (3rd Day)

Clause 18: Immunity from prosecution

Amendment 116

Moved by

116: Clause 18, page 16, line 35, at end insert— ‘‘(6A) Condition D: the immunity requests panel is satisfied that P is not engaged in activity that is likely to be understood by a reasonable person as precluding reconciliation.(6B) For the purposes of subsection (6A), “activity” means conduct, speech or writing of any description by P which serves to publicise and promote P’s disclosed conduct or glorify the commission, preparation or instigation of any Troubles-related offence.(6C) For the purposes of subsection (6A), “activity” means any activity described in subsection (6B) irrespective of whether P seeks or receives financial reward.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment would require an individual to be disengaged from activity which would be reasonably regarded as precluding reconciliation in order to be eligible for immunity from prosecution.

My Lords, in this group, I will speak to Amendments 116, 117, 118, 127, 132 and 177 in my name and those of my noble friends. Amendment 116 would

“require an individual to be disengaged from activity which would be reasonably regarded as precluding reconciliation in order to be eligible for immunity from prosecution.”

Of course, at Second Reading, we debated at some length the general issues regarding the Bill, but we now come to the glorification of terrorism, which has become a very real issue in Northern Ireland over recent months and the last number of years, with the rising tide of people engaged in such activity. We have seen sickening videos of many young people, born long after the ceasefires and the Belfast agreement, seemingly revelling in glorifying IRA terrorism. Others engage in other activities on their side as well, but it seems particularly prevalent among young republicans, and it is causing real concern that there seems to be a sanitisation of the IRA’s murderous campaign.

This is not helped by the vice-president of Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill, who has gone around telling people that there was no alternative to the IRA’s campaign. But of course, as the leaders of democratic nationalism made clear during all of those years, there always was an alternative and there was never an excuse for murder, violence and mayhem. When that is the sort of leadership—or lack of leadership —provided, it is little wonder that people now take their lead from that and say, “If this is what our leaders are saying, we should glorify these people and celebrate them”, rather than making it clear that there was no space for such murderous activity. That is of course compounded by numerous examples of leading Sinn Féin elected representatives attending memorials, eulogising terrorists, praising their past activities and justifying murder today. It is one thing to have supported this kind of murderous campaign at the time, but still to eulogise that murderous activity nowadays is totally unacceptable.

My Lords, I support this group of amendments. I ask the Committee to consider them not in the detail of the proposed wording but in the entirety of their spirit and background, with which the Minister is very well acquainted. It is vital, as the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, has just said, that we take a wide view of what should be removed from immunity.

I have devoted a great deal—in fact, most—of my adult life to working for reconciliation. In the process, I have met many young people sucked into the paramilitary machine, not always realising what was happening to them—that was the human tragedy of it—but living to regret that they had allowed this to happen in their lives. I see these amendments in terms of those young people. I have seen what some of them have managed to do with their lives You might perhaps call it reconciliation; I prefer to call it a reawakening of conscience and of isolation from paramilitary activity. The success stories that I have seen have been from those who recognised that there was not an easy path to follow but that it was worth following. Those are the young people who these amendments are mostly targeted at.

I have seen those who have paid the price for what they have done. They have served their time and have managed to build some sort of decency to their lives. But I have also seen some who are extremely subtle in the way in which they have embarked on a continuing career that encourages others to be involved in criminal activity. I put it on the record, and ask the Minister to consider in his response, that we have to take the broadest possible attitude to the way in which society deals with what we call reconciliation, particularly in Northern Ireland terms. It is easy to write about it, to make money out of it and to establish it in programmes, the media and published work—you name it, it is there. This group of amendments reminds the Committee that we have to be realistic and to recognise that these things do happen and that there is no way in which any society moving forward can grant immunity to those who constantly find ways of escaping the net that the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, has spoken of.

My Lords, I support these amendments and I support what the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, just said about children. Children are the future for Northern Ireland, and integrated education and more understanding between the communities are all-important. This form of glorification is directly appealing to them. The integrated schools are fine. We are also moving into joint campuses—or I hope we are. In my local village of Brookeborough, they currently do one day of joint education between the Catholic maintained school and the state primary school. Half the school goes each way; I happened to go and visit it the other day. It was really good and the children were really enjoying it; it was fantastic. Another school further up the country was meant to be on the list but has been taken off the list because it was not doing joint education before and the parents all objected. The key is that integrating schools is by choice. The future is that these schools will be integrated because that is the only place they will have to go to school, but all this glorification—these songs and everything else—is in direct conflict with that.

I was speaking to a principal who said that a few years ago she wanted to introduce Gaelic football to the state primary school, which was a good thing. However, an incident like this happened on the day they were going to do it for the first time; half the parents walked in, removed their children for the day and said, “We are not doing it”. It is not just the victims and their families getting humiliated by these songs and other things, which is bad enough. It is the future, and if we allow this to go on and it becomes a lovely thing to do, to sing those songs outside a school or close to children whose grandparents may have been killed—uncles, aunts, whatever—this is really important. We must not look at it as something that is acceptable. It would be totally unacceptable if somebody who supported ISIS went to Borough Market and shouted “Up ISIS” or whatever. Straightaway, in this country, they would be landed on and would not get away. With us, we accept it, but this is about our future and the children. It is with the primary schoolchildren that it has to start. We should support these amendments.

My Lords, anyone who lived through the years of Northern Ireland’s violent past will understand that we want to save the present generation and generations to come from such an awful fate. Practically every week I meet a family that still feels the hurt and endures the scars of the past, whether it be the widow who still grieves or the little boy or girl who has had to be raised without a father because their father was brutally murdered.

In light of the serious, severe threat for the future that has now been announced by the Secretary of State, we need to be very careful. If folks are glorifying acts of terrorism, young people can easily get sucked into this and think that it is just a bit of a thrill. The lives of those who get involved will be scarred. I am speaking about those who are actually involved in acts of terrorism, because their lives, their conscience, will never be the same again. Quite a number of them cannot live with their conscience and quite a number have done themselves to death.

The glorification of murder cannot be accepted. It is very sad when the leader of Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland excuses the years of murder and mayhem that the Province experienced, stating that there was no alternative. Ministers in the past have rightly said that there always was an alternative, and that was the pathway of democracy. But the reason Michelle O’Neill says this is that they are rewriting history. They want to excuse and cover up the bloodthirsty past that many of them have.

I am fearful that this is the mindset that, even today, political leaders in Sinn Féin engender in the hearts of their young people. From their earliest days, they have ingrained in their minds a deep hatred of Britishness and those who desire to remain British. When I was growing up in Northern Ireland, people could live together. They could have completely different political outlooks but nevertheless lived within one community. They lived and let live.

My Lords, these amendments relate to Clause 18 and immunity from prosecution. Those provisions are profoundly flawed, as was stated just two weeks ago by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, which condemned the immunity provisions.

This group of amendments is described as relating to glorification. They seek to ensure that a person seeking to avail themselves of the immunity provisions that we have discussed, as the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, said, is not engaged in activity which precludes reconciliation. For that reason, I support all the amendments from the noble Lord. We have seen a whole range of activity which undermines attempts at reconciliation on both sides of the community and activity referring to past atrocities and glorifying those involved. The noble Lord gave a very graphic example in South Down.

I think also of the murals, in particular one in north Belfast that I regard almost with terror; it depicts two hooded gunmen who say, “Prepared for peace, ready for war”. It is a declaration of war and has stayed there regardless of all the attempts at promoting reconciliation. Many of these murals have been painted over, but some very deliberately have not. The problem is that there is nothing to be glorified in shootings, bombings, torture or exile. We all know that what results from those is pain, trauma and terror that sometimes lasts a lifetime.

I have worked with people who were at some of those incidents, where gunmen arrived to shoot somebody in a workman’s hut, or something like that, and 20 or 30 years on they still live in terror of those who came, because they did not get shot dead and others did. So I do support those amendments.

I have put my name to Amendment 167 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, because that seeks to prevent individuals who have been granted immunity from profiting from their conduct, in relation to the offence for which they might be granted immunity, through empowering the Secretary of State to make regulations to prohibit such activity.

My Lords, in terms of this group of amendments, I think most of us would be of the view that we do not regard the Bill itself as being acceptable, so this is not an attempt to turn something that is unacceptable into being acceptable, but there is, at least, a duty on us to try to make what improvements we can.

We do not agree with concept of immunity, but it is undoubtedly the case that, if there is some provision for immunity, it has to be on the strictest conditions. Therefore, provisions that are contained within these amendments, which rule it out in circumstances where somebody is preventing reconciliation or glorifying terrorism, is a step in the right direction. There is deep hurt caused to victims of terrorism and their families whenever they see those who have been engaged with terrorism glorifying it. I think this is not the intention of the Bill, but there is a danger that, if the Bill were to go through unamended, it could inadvertently facilitate these “terror tours” or “terror talks”, and unfortunately almost act as encouragement, because those who have previously been involved in those activities will feel they have a level of carte blanche to do that. It is important we do not see a rewriting of history.

It is also the case that the glorification of terrorism per se is wrong. It does not matter whether it is a glorification of republican or loyalist terrorism, or terrorism from another part of the world; it is deeply wrong. As others have said, this is not simply about the past; it is about the future also, and it is deeply concerning that at times we are seeing the casualisation of the celebration of terrorism, and the embracing of it, particularly by a generation who never experienced it.

I will give two recent examples which are not hearsay; one of them is on social media. Shortly after the Omagh shooting, police moved in to make arrests and they arrested a young man who was not even born at the time of the Good Friday agreement. Somebody videoed that occasion, when some of the neighbours were coming out and applauding the person as they were being arrested. That is deeply worrying. On another occasion very recently, a friend of mine sent me a screenshot of a product that is available not on some niche website or from a paramilitary-linked group, but from a mainstream, UK-wide online shopping facility. It was a card you could buy for £3.50. It had a picture of someone in paramilitary uniform, wearing a balaclava and a beret, and had the phrase “Tiocfaidh Ár Lá” on it. Underneath it said, “Happy Mother’s Day”, which is quite chilling. And that is the problem. We are, unfortunately, reaching a point where there is a normalisation of the glorification of terrorism, so I believe that these are important steps to take and I hope that the Committee can unite around these amendments.

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the amendments in this group. As someone who, like others in this Chamber, has been the victim of terrorism, it really galls me to see people who for a number of years did not do this—I think the fact that they left a space between the end of the violence and now is quite deliberate—and are now encouraging and romanticising what happened during those dark days of what are euphemistically called the Troubles.

It is really chilling that, today, in Omagh—the place where Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell was gunned down—there are stickers appearing to encourage young people to join up. I find it so chilling, but that is the inevitable consequence of glorifying something that these young people have no knowledge of. They think it is the thing to do to show their loyalty to Ireland. The people who are encouraging this have a terrible responsibility on their heads, but they will continue to do it unless there is an indicator from government that it is wrong.