Hilary Benn

I expressed that view to the veterans I met this afternoon, when I thanked them for their service in the most difficult and dangerous circumstances. The right hon. Member invites me to do that this evening, and I readily do it, because they were seeking to protect the citizens of the United Kingdom, including of Northern Ireland, in the face of terrorism and terrorists. As the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington pointed out in his speech, the terrorists were responsible for the vast majority of deaths. However, I would add that many of them were prosecuted and convicted—paramilitaries on the republican side, and also those on the loyalist side who were also guilty of the most appalling crimes. As was pointed out, part of the price—in my view, rightly paid—to enable the Good Friday agreement to succeed and to bring the extraordinary peace and prosperity Northern Ireland has seen in the almost 27 years since, was the release of prisoners, which was really, really difficult for many families to accept, to understand and to cope with. I would also point out that, in recent years, a number of republicans have indeed been prosecuted—in fact, more republicans have been. I think I am right in saying that there has been one conviction in the last 12 years of a soldier who served there, and that was a suspended sentence. The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) mentioned the case of Robert Nairac. The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, which does such an important job to try to reunite the remains of loved ones who were murdered by the Provisional IRA with their families—although Robert Nairac’s parents are dead, I think he has other living relatives—has made two recent attempts to find his remains, on the basis of information it has received. I am very sad to say that so far that has not proved possible, but I hope that those who have information, and who have enabled the ICLVR to find the remains of a number of people and return them to their families, will continue to provide information to that body so that it is able to recover those remains. As the Secretary of State, it is my job to ensure that these concerns and perspectives are heard, alongside other views expressed by a range of parties who also want to see, in their own way, a resolution to the complex troubles that happened and the issues that remain outstanding. I am thinking in particular of the many families I have met since taking up the post who have said to me, “We still do not know, decades later, what happened to our loved ones who were killed.” They carry that trauma with them to this day. Therefore, the Government are absolutely committed to trying to develop legacy mechanisms that are compliant with human rights—I stand with the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington in my support, and the Government’s support, for the European convention on human rights—and that can command a degree of public confidence across communities in Northern Ireland and Great Britain. I will just say this about the approach the previous Government took. It caused, self-evidently, immense difficulties, including numerous findings of human rights incompatibilities and therefore an erosion of trust in the Government’s ability to address these issues fairly.