Baroness O'Loan (CB)

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate tonight. It has been wide-ranging, going way beyond the scope of the regret Motion that I tabled—I knew it would be thus. I would like to correct one issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Caine. For 20 years, I have called for the establishment of an independent body to deal with the past. My objection to the legislation about the ICRIR was the way in which it lacked independence and was to be so circumscribed and controlled by government. What we are contemplating now is the future handling of the legacy of the past. Tonight’s debate has enabled wide-ranging discussion of the past. The multiple atrocities of the past have been well articulated here tonight. We should never forget. When I do this work, I am always catapulted back to the darkness, the terror and the pain of the bomb explosion in 1977, which took the life of my first baby as I was pregnant, and to the terrible attempted murder of one of my boys almost 20 years ago by loyalists. The IRA killed my first child; the loyalists tried to kill this child. They left him with life-changing injuries. There are many tears, my Lords—many, many tears. For many decades I have worked also with victims. I remember the police widow who told me that she sat at her window in her lonely farmhouse for decades, waiting for the police officers, her husband’s colleagues, to come back and tell her what had happened—what they had found. But they never came. They were moved on to other cases. I remember the parents of the last soldier to die in Northern Ireland, Stephen Restorick, whose case I dealt with. I remember the children of Jean McConville and all the disappeared of the Troubles —disappeared by the IRA—with whom I have worked extensively, and I was thinking most recently of the victims of the Omagh bombing, whose stories have been told so graphically in the past weeks. So much pain—so much grief. We must find a way to provide one system, accessible to all, which seeks to provide for the needs of all. It will be difficult but we must find a way. In that spirit of positivity I tabled this regret Motion. It is important to explore together as constructively as we can how we can care for all our people as we journey forward into the future. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.