Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Eleven months ago, the Stormont House Agreement was agreed by the Governments and some of the parties in Northern Ireland. It provided a basis for preventing the imminent collapse of the Executive and Assembly, and it was presented as a decisive move forward. What it did not represent was a decisive move away from the behaviour which caused that crisis in the first place. The main players carried on as before and lurched into the inevitable impasse of recent months.

This new agreement is welcome because it removes the immediate threat of long-term collapse of democratic institutions established as the result of the overwhelming support of the people of this island. It provides a fresh start only in terms of the implementation of the previous deal. It does not provide a fresh start, or anything close to it, for the people of Northern Ireland. The core dysfunction of recent years is not addressed in this agreement. Unless this is challenged, unless the parties start working together and the Governments re-engage, the destructive cycle of crises will continue and the people of Northern Ireland will be the biggest losers.

One element which is new in the agreement is the commitment to focus on addressing paramilitarism in Northern Ireland. The cult of the so-called big man who can enforce silence and discipline is a curse which has held back communities which want to unite to build a shared peace and prosperity. The extra resources and procedures for monitoring and challenging paramilitarism and cross-Border gangsterism are very welcome. Only a few weeks ago some elements here were denying there was any problem. They were claiming that anyone who expressed concern was playing politics. Today, they are promoting a deal which recognises the sinister remnants of groups which have brought nothing but misery to this island for far too long. We strongly support the new commitment to disrupt their network and show that no one is untouchable. We are very surprised that the agreement does not give explicit parity to the threat posed by loyalist paramilitarism. As has been seen too often, particularly on the streets of Belfast, this sinister element remains and must also be tackled with the same force as provisional and dissident paramilitarism.

It is a major failing of this agreement that it fails to address the right of families to know who was responsible for the deaths of their loved ones. The British Government remains in clear breach of its commitments in the Weston Park Agreement to allow the open and independent investigation of crimes, such as the murder of Pat Finucane which traces to collusion by British forces, the Dublin-Monaghan bombings and many others. Equally, the provisional movement has continued to deny basic justice and closure to many of its victims, including cases of abuse and murder which happened well after the ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement.

So far, the Irish Government is the only party to this issue which has fulfilled its commitment to transparency about the past. Allegations of Garda collusion were subject to rigorous independent investigation, and the policy has been that the truth must be allowed to emerge no matter how uncomfortable. Unfortunately, the British government and Sinn Féin have stood in the way of dealing with the past to protect their own interests. Each continues to focus on the victims of others and does the absolute minimum on anything involving their side. We share the outrage of victims' groups about how this issue has been brushed aside. At a minimum they are entitled to see the proposals tabled by the parties to this agreement in order that we can all see how serious these negotiations actually were. The cover-up must stop.

The continued failure to agree the Bill of Rights and Act, as well as the restoration of the civic forum is a disgrace, and each represents a breach of an agreement supported by an overwhelming majority of the Irish people in a free referendum. Clearly, Deputy Adams’s description of the equality agenda as the “Trojan horse” of the provisional movement has caused damage, but equality measures are not an option for those who participate in the Northern institutions. They are an essential requirement. It is, at best, unfortunate that the Governments did not insist on tougher measures to secure their implementation. The agreement does contain a fig leaf concerning the civic forum by providing for a civic advisory panel. The detail reveals that this, too, is utterly devoid of substance. Its members will be nominated by the DUP and Sinn Féin, it will represent only a few elements of civic society and, most incredibly, it will be allowed to discuss no more than two issues a year, each of which will be cleared in advance by the DUP and Sinn Féin. The civic forum was kept in suspension because when the DUP and Sinn Féin took control of the Executive, they wanted to limit alternative voices. In tandem with the limiting of access to information for other parties in the Executive, they said that the civic forum was not needed because the First and Deputy First Ministers would be available to civic society. It has taken some remarkable neck for Sinn Féin suddenly to start calling for the restoration of the forum when it refused to restore it and it has now agreed a meaningless and politically compliant replacement.

The financial measures included in the agreement have received a lot of attention in the past week. Many claims have been made about what they amount to, but the only thing which is clear is that there has not been a commitment to major new funding for Northern Ireland. Through the concentration of what was a six-year programme into four years, unidentified savings and an amount of wishful thinking, there has been quite a bit of hype from the parties about the outcome. Before any of this can be trusted, let us see the detail. The claims made last year about mitigating welfare cuts turned out to be false. There is no reason to believe that this time it will be any different. That much of the welfare mitigation will come directly from funding for other public services is of real concern. So too is the fact that €125 million will be available only if it appears through a clampdown on welfare fraud, which is unlikely to secure anything close to that figure. There has already been some analysis of that.

In this agreement, Sinn Féin decided to hand power back to London to avoid having to vote for measures it was enabling. This is a profound confirmation that it puts party interests before the ideology of which it claims to be the sole representative on this island. The handing of power back to London was enforced by Sinn Féin and the DUP with an aggressive manoeuvre in the Assembly. It is quite extraordinary. The material was published three minutes before the debate, and standard scrutiny procedures were suspended. This puts even our own debate-averse Government in the shade when it comes to marginalising democratic assemblies. I have never come across anything like this before.

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