Mr. Alan Brecknell:

I am not sure how the committees work, but anything that can be done to bring this away from being a British-Irish issue, so to speak, and to get the Americans involved is always helpful. Sometimes, they do not have the best human rights record either and we need to bear that in mind when we are talking about moving things forward. However, if we can get pressure to come to bear, from whatever format it comes, that is always helpful.

With regard to what else can be done, part of the difficulty we have is that the victim and survivor community, if that is what one wants to call them, is quite diverse. I alluded to that in my opening comments when I made the point that all five political parties in the North are opposed to these proposals, but probably for slightly different reasons. That makes it more difficult for the political parties here to speak with one voice and that filters through the victims and survivors community.

The issue needs to be addressed from the point of view of saying to all the MPs who, at the end of the day, are the people who will vote on this, that it is not a black and white issue about whether their veterans did anything right or wrong. That is how it is portrayed and is being portrayed in the vast majority of the British press. We need to try to inform those people who may be thinking of voting this through that this goes way beyond what their veterans and next-door neighbours who happened to serve in the North in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s did or did not do here.

We need to be saying to them that there is a bigger issue here. This is about the rule of law, as Ms Gildernew and others have mentioned. It is about Britain's standing in the world and whether it thinks it has a standing. Well, it thinks it has a standing. Whether others think it has a standing anymore and whether it cares about it is another thing. However, it also sends out a very bad message to other democracies around the world and other countries that are less than democracies. Here we have Britain, which claims to be the mother of all democracies, flouting the rule of law.

We need to be able to talk to those people.

At the end of the day, the MPs at this meeting are the people who have that wherewithal. I am not sure how one would go about that because it is quite difficult to call large numbers of people together to talk to them. It would be difficult. Perhaps others will correct me and tell me we can get people together. It would be important to get as many members of the Opposition together as possible. However, 80 others would still be needed to vote. The question is how we convince those people.

It will be interesting when the legislation goes before the House of Lords. There will be a decent debate there because there are some very good people in that House who are completely opposed to this and know what they are talking about. However, that will only slow it down. The House of Lords cannot stop the legislation. We need to talk to MPs. That needs to come from pressure from parliamentarians in other jurisdictions, whether that is America, Canada, Australia or other Commonwealth countries. We need to think more strategically about the issue but I do not have an answer. Those are my ramblings.