Chris Bryant

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time. I want to start by expressing my very sincere thanks to the team who have been working on the Bill for some considerable time: Daniel Thrower, Charlotte Brennan, Sharon Carter, Niall Haughey, Philip Shaw, Will Durkin and the whole legacy team in the Northern Ireland Office. My thanks also to the Minister for Veterans and People, who is sitting by my side; the Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen); and, of course, the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds South (Hilary Benn), who brought in this Bill in the first place. I pay tribute to every single one of them. We normally associate “legacy” with our inheritance from our parents or our ancestors. In some cases, it means wealth or property, or perhaps a family tradition that has been handed down through the generations—something that one family does differently from another. For most, our common legacy is a positive thing; it could be a sense of our shared history, or our national pride in the things that we do phenomenally well: our national health service, perhaps, or our storytellers, authors, playwrights and musicians, our bravery in two world wars, or our armed forces. But the legacy in Northern Ireland is different. In many ways, it is a legacy of division, antagonism, sectarianism, and violence. It is a legacy of extraordinary trauma. In Greek, “trauma” originally meant a wound, but it means so much more. It is an open wound, in many cases. It is the wound felt by a woman who lost her brother, an RUC officer, years ago, and has nightmares all the time about how he died; by the man who goes to Marks & Spencer every day and sees the man who he knows killed his father, who served in the armed forces; by the man who gave up his college music course to join the Army when his brother was blown up, and still worries that he has never lived up to his brother, because he never found out precisely what happened to him when he was killed; by the young woman who worries that she cannot even remember her daddy, who was killed when she was so young that she cannot even remember his face, and she feels guilty about it; by the teenager who sees photos of his grandaddy, who was murdered by the IRA before he was born, every single time the troubles are reported on the news; or by the family who still have not located the body of the family member they know was killed. Patrick Keefe, in “Say Nothing”, wrote this: “Perhaps the cruellest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.” I felt that so strongly recently, when I had the deeply sobering experience of visiting an active dig by the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains at Derryclone in County Antrim, where the commission’s dedicated investigators are to this day searching for the remains of Seamus Maguire. Seamus was just 26 years old when he was disappeared in Lurgan in 1973. My thoughts are, of course, with the Maguire family, as well as with the families of Columba McVeigh, Joseph Lynskey and Robert Nairac, who await the return of their loved ones. That is a phenomenal trauma that still lives in many families’ lives. When their loved ones had been disappeared, they still got letters from people pretending to be them—a particular form of cruelty. When people say to me that people in Northern Ireland need to move on, my answer is no. No one has moved on more than the victims and survivors of the troubles. They are not living in the past; they are living with the past. If the trauma is not resolved and people do not get answers, it will pass on to the next generation. I know that lots of people do not support every clause of this Bill—some do not support any clause it—but I relay the words of the Royal British Legion this week: “Veterans and those Armed Forces families who lost loved ones in the conflict deserve answers. It is in the interests of the whole of Armed Forces community affected by the Troubles that steady progress is made to ensure this legislation’s provisions are effective.” Although much of the debate yesterday and today has been about veterans, this is primarily about families. As Joe McVey, the Victims’ Commissioner for Northern Ireland, said: “As parliamentarians you have the opportunity to provide legislation that puts victims and survivors at the heart of the new Bill and also provides mechanisms that will give confidence to victims and survivors who have waited too long. Their voices must shape and determine what happens next.” I want to explain briefly why this really matters to me. Back in 1986, I was one of the first British people to be in Argentina after the dictatorship came to an end. Many of my friends had been tortured. I knew that they had been tortured—they spoke about it. One night, I went to a bar with a friend of mine. He went to the loo, and he stayed there for a very long time. I wondered what was happening, so I went to find him. He was lying on the floor in the cubicle in floods of tears, because, he said, the man standing next to us at the bar was the man who had tortured him systematically for two months, several years earlier. I said to him, “How can you possibly know? You always told me that you were blindfolded throughout.” He said, “Well, when somebody pushes your head down into shitty, icy cold water until you nearly drown five times a day, and when they apply electrodes to your genitals three times a day, you get to know them by the way they breathe, by the way they walk into the room, by the tenor of their voice. And I know that man is the man who tortured me.” That story is from a long time ago and from a different country, but I have met people in Northern Ireland who have faced exactly the same. Those people have never had an answer. They have never had a moment when what happened to them and their loved ones has even been recognised in the public domain. This Bill is not about one group or another. It is not about special favours for one group or another. It is about honesty, candour, the pursuit of justice and, most importantly, truth, because in the end, only truth can really set us free.