Lord Bew (CB)

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady O’Loan for her important speech this evening. She is one of the victims of the Troubles, and it is important to pay attention to everything that she has said tonight. I think that the outstanding issues in her speech will be resolved either by the Government taking actions to improve the workings of the ICRIR or by subsequent cases in the courts. That is the likely future for the issues she raised. If I have gathered correctly, my noble friend is a critic of the ICRIR in principle, and I approach this problem from a very different angle. I am not a critic of the ICRIR project. I admire enormously the way that Sir Declan Morgan has led it through very difficult times in the last few months. I therefore have a very different angle of vision from that of my noble friend. This week, the Prime Minister, in his very important speech on defence, said that in 1989 he could not have envisaged a situation in Europe where the Ukraine war was happening and there was an invasion of boundaries and so on. At a moment of great hope with the collapse of communism, he could not have envisaged this. It provoked a thought in me: at the time of the Good Friday agreement, I could not have envisaged that, more than a quarter of a century later, we would be sitting in this House debating legacy cases and how legacy cases have been carried on. If you look at the language in the Good Friday agreement itself, you could reasonably argue that it is somewhat curt on legacy victims. They are advised to take pleasure in the fact that we had negotiated peace. You would not gather from the Good Friday agreement that we would have this long, traipsing agony continuing through the courts this week—and which is likely to continue ad infinitum, unless something like the ICRIR works. It is the most important part of the 2023 Act, which I supported almost in its entirety. The ICRIR remains, and without it, we would have a future where these cases straggle on and on.