Mr Paul Foster

Thank you, Mr Mundell, for allowing me to contribute to today’s petition debate; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I will not take any interventions, and I will be as short as I can to allow as many Members as possible to speak. I start by reminding everyone once again that I am a proud retired Royal Engineer. Although I did not serve in Op Banner, many colleagues and friends did. The Op Banner veterans did their duty in exceptionally challenging circumstances, and I commend them all—each and every one of them. I would also point out to colleagues that, despite not serving in Op Banner, I was in Quebec barracks in Osnabrück in Germany when it was attacked by the IRA in June 1996. I get it, I really do. What is of the utmost importance is that we deal in facts, and facts alone. Fact one: the previous Conservative Government pushed through the legacy Act in 2023. The Act created one route for dealing with the past, through the creation of the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery. It received almost unanimous condemnation from victims groups and the political parties in Northern Ireland, for differing reasons, as has been said. Fact two: the previous Conservative Government publicly stated at the time, despite numerous challenges, that the Act would be fully compliant with the European convention on human rights, the Windsor framework and the Good Friday agreement, and they knew that that most certainly was not the case. In February ’24, the Northern Ireland High Court found that the Act was in fact incompatible with the European convention on human rights, specifically articles 2, 3 and 6, and it was therefore deemed unlawful. It also found that it was incompatible with article 2 of the Windsor framework, and that it should therefore be disapplied. If the previous Government knew that this was the case, they should never have proceeded in pushing the legacy Act through Parliament. It was a deliberate and wholly irresponsible course of action.