Jim Allister

The Secretary of State is not known for selling himself short, but even he would have to acknowledge that the Bill he has produced and amended has fallen well short of universal acclaim. It has unimpressed a lot of people and interests. It is not that there is no good in the Bill; it is a question in many instances of the balance, or lack of balance, that it strikes. Indeed, one of the fundamental failures of the Bill comes from the inherent preferences that the Secretary of State has made within it. The most horrendous terrorist attack in Northern Ireland, in terms of the number of victims, was the Omagh bomb, yet the Secretary of State has chosen to draw a line in the Bill that excludes investigation of that bombing by the legacy commission. One of the most egregious and audacious IRA attacks was at Loughgall, where eight heavily armed IRA terrorists came to destroy a police station, with a bomb in the bucket of a digger and a vanload of terrorists to shoot up the station, yet the Secretary of State has chosen to include that attack within the special category of those who will be entitled to full inquests. On the one hand, the Secretary of State excludes Omagh from the framework of the Bill; on the other hand, he includes within it the most audacious of the IRA attacks, giving the families of those IRA chosen terrorists the right to a full inquest, and then he proceeds with an amendment to prevent other inquests. It is by drawing such preferences that the Secretary of State has caused the Bill to suffer from both a lack of balance and a lack of appreciation and support across the entire community. There can be no case more undeserving of an inquest than Loughgall, which involved hardened terrorists with dozens upon dozens of innocent victims to their account of murder, as we have heard from the right hon. Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis), under the leadership of Patrick Kelly and Lynagh, one of the most notorious IRA terrorists, who had already carried out a carbon-copy attack on Ballygawley police station, and then on the Birches. At Ballygawley they had murdered police officers. At Loughgall they came at the particular hour when they knew policemen would be leaving at the end of their shift. Their bomb was concealed in rubble in the bucket of a digger, and they had a load of terrorists to shoot up the station and repeat what they had done at Ballygawley and the Birches. Happily—yes, happily—they met the SAS. Happily, the SAS ensured that they would never murder again. In that, the SAS saved countless lives, because that bunch of terrorists had already taken dozens upon dozens of lives. In 2017, declassified documents from ballistic tests showed that their weapons had been used in between 40 and 50 murders. These were not boy scouts on an outing; they were fully armed, dedicated, hateful terrorists coming to murder and kill. When they were dealt with as they ought to have been, what do the Government do? They say, “Oh, we will give you a special place within our legacy Bill—a special protection—so that your families will have what other families will not. You will have a full-blown inquest at public expense. It will cost whatever millions it takes. We will fully legally aid all of you to be represented so that you can try to pick at the lawful actions of the SAS soldiers.”