Thank you, Chairman. I consider it a great privilege to lead the Ulster Unionist Party, and an equal honour to be here today to make these comments. When I was told that no Unionist leader had ever spoken in a formal sense in Leinster House, my initial reaction was that it could not be true. I accept that it is so but, to my mind, it is not right given the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. As such, I am happy to take this opportunity to address the omission.
I am particularly pleased to be here in the week that saw the completion of four days of celebrations of Her Majesty's diamond jubilee. It would be absurd to expect the parliamentarians whom I am addressing - who stood and gained election to the parliament of a republic, with an elected president - to support the principle of an hereditary Head of State. Leaving aside the principle for one moment, however, this monarch is an individual who has devoted her life to public service. In an era when we teach our children that there is no such thing as a job for life, 60 years of selfless devotion to duty is something we all can admire and aspire to, whether monarchists, Unionists, republicans or Nationalists. I take this opportunity to acknowledge the visit by Queen Elizabeth II to the Republic last May. To go where she went, to pay her respects in the manner she paid them was, for me, a great act of leadership and an example to us all that one can set about such things without compromise to one's own identity, heritage and belief systems, in the same way that I have no fear of my unionism being undermined by my attendance here today, nor my Protestantism being diluted by attending a funeral mass.
I am a great admirer of the work of John Hewitt, a poet whose remarks on identity are often misquoted. In a letter he wrote in 1964, he said:
I always maintained that our loyalties had an order to Ulster, to Ireland, to the British Archipelago, to Europe; and that anyone who skipped a step or missed a link falsified the total. The Unionists missed out Ireland; the Northern Nationalists (The Green Tories) couldn't see the Ulster under their feet; the Republicans missed out both Ulster and the Archipelago; and none gave any heed to Europe at all.
I believe that passage is the genesis of Mr. Hewitt's proposition that he was an Ulsterman, an Irishman, British and European, and that to deny any part was to diminish the whole. That is a lesson I hope we have all learned during the past 40-plus years.
My own spin on John Hewitt's multi-identity is that I am a proud Unionist, happy and determined to promote and advance the Union of Northern Ireland with England, Scotland and Wales. Yet I am also extremely proud of the day I wore the green vest of Ireland, with the shamrock on my chest. It was nothing more than a schools' international athletics event, but it was a great day for me and my parents when I ran the 400m hurdle race for Ireland at Meadowbank in Edinburgh. Let there be no doubt - for one day, I was out to beat the English, the Scots and the Welsh. I wanted to bring that trophy on the aeroplane back to Dublin, as many Ulstermen and women have done across many sporting and cultural occasions down the years.
This joint committee of Deputies and Senators has oversight of the implementation of the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement. Fourteen years on much has been achieved and it would be churlish not to acknowledge and celebrate that fact. If this is to be an honest conversation, we must also acknowledge and highlight what remains to be done and we should also question why it has taken so long.
I referred to the Queen's visit to Dublin last year as one of the greatest acts of leadership I have witnessed. By contrast, there was the decision of the last Lord Mayor of Belfast not to shake the hand of a 15 year old girl who had achieved her Duke of Edinburgh silver award because she had come through army cadets and then he stood down as Lord Mayor early to avoid the Queen's forthcoming visit to Belfast. I do not wish what I am saying to be seen as some sort of petty party political comment because it is not meant to be. The fact is that the handshake is at the core of the symbolism of our political journey. I often shake the hand of Martin McGuinness, a self-confessed IRA commander. I could argue I have personal reason not to. On 25 January 1973, the IRA blew up my father's linen business. I did not know it then but that was the last day that he got out of bed with a true sense of purpose in his life. I am lucky that I can move on and focus on the 60,000 citizens of Northern Ireland who are currently without a job, with no reason to get out of bed or sense of achievement when they go bed at the end of the day. I understand the importance of a handshake.
We often talk of the need for apologies. For me, an apology - "I'm sorry" - is relatively easy. It is swimming in the shallow end, the deep end of the pool, that involves acknowledgement, recognition and outreach. A handshake can convey all that. The handshake has been a constant in this process. I note Peter Robinson has yet to offer a handshake, at least in public, to Martin McGuinness. As a news reporter with UTV, I chased the then Secretary of State, Patrick Mayhew, around the Sheraton Hotel in Washington waiting to see if he would shake the hand of Gerry Adams when they first met in 1995. We all remember that awkward moment outside Government Buildings when the then Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, John Hume and Gerry Adams discovered a three-handed shake needs a bit of planning in advance. I look forward to the Queen and Martin McGuinness shaking hands later this month. The handshake has been a potent symbol of progress. For all political leaders and all of us, there is no à la carte in the peace process. It is full-on, or full-stop, symbolically or practically.
In moving on to deal with the past, which they say is the Achilles' heel of the peace process, I would like to share a story of my time as a commissioner for the victims and survivors of the Troubles. I was approached by a man from west Belfast. His father had been in the IRA and was shot dead by the army. Of all four commissioners, he asked for me in particular. As I started out in that role, it felt like a huge challenge, coming from suburban east Belfast because he had asked for me particularly and I feared that he would ask me to do something and did not know what that might be. His story was that he was one of several children and they loved their mother dearly. She worked as a housewife and mother and thus was always there for them. They loved their father as well, but he worked during the day and went out a good deal at night and so they did not see as much of him as they did of their mother. Then, one night, they discovered why he went out so much at night. The son told me about waking up in the middle of the night, hearing the screams of his mother, a commotion downstairs and before he got to the bottom of the stairs, he had instinctively realised his father was dead. Over the course of the next few days he came to realise why his father went out so much at night. He was in the IRA. For the next number of years, their mother worked tirelessly, getting them out of bed, fed, clothed, washed, off to school, picking them up at the school gates in the afternoon, keeping them out of trouble, making them do their homework and, effectively, making the most of a bad lot. The children grew up, married, left their mother with an empty nest, old before her time and with no motivation to get out of bed. That is the point at which the son came to see me. The difficulty was that he was worried about his mother, worried he would call to the house one day to find she had passed away in the armchair beside the fire. I got the children together and they were split down the middle in that half of them blamed their father for the past 20 plus years in that none of this would have happened if he had not joined the IRA, but the other half rose up and said "don't you ever disrespect our father's memory like that again". It was clear to me that when their mother would pass away, that family would split and that this split would continue into another generation and cousins would not be allowed to play with cousins - people who were born decades after their grandfather had died.
There is a question I never asked my friend from west Belfast - it was did his father blow up my father's linen business. That is the story of the Troubles. It is the story of Civil War here, the miners' strike in England and of conflict. Our challenge and duty is to intervene to break that cycle, the intergenerational cycle. We need the members' help and the help of London and Brussels, but members can be in no doubt that the Ulster Unionist Party will be brave, imaginative and responsible, as we were in 1998, but we cannot do this alone.
I would also like to be clear that we will not participate in a process, in dealing with this past process, that attempts to re-write history, especially in a manner that paints the state and its agents and representatives as the sole villains. Everybody needs to put his or her hand up on this, as our Prime Minister has already done over Bloody Sunday and our Secretary of State has done over aspects of how the Claudy bomb was handled. We now await some reciprocal acknowledgements.
Last week, one of the parties to our coalition government withdrew from the working group on cohesion, sharing and integration. Again, this is not a moment to score party political points, rather, it is an opportunity to alert this committee to the depth of difficulty we are encountering in attempting to achieve a shared, rather than a shared-out future. There is no better physical example of the difficulty than the plans for the development of the former Girdwood army barracks in north Belfast. This is a set of proposals, which we have supported reluctantly and only because we believe it is an acknowledgement of the reality of life on the ground. The challenge of creating a shared future is to convince people that it is a good idea.
A friend of mine who is a businessman in Belfast put it this way - he said our housing is segregated, our schools are segregated and many of our sports are segregated, and that we attend separate churches. He said that the only arena where people have to mix is the workplace, and businessmen and women have a legal obligation placed on them to ensure they do. That is not good enough. We, the politicians, need to take the lead; we need to set the example. We need to take more responsibility than business people, not less.
The first Northern Ireland Peace Monitoring Report, published by the Community Relations Council this year, defines the task. It states that "... the majority of the population lives in areas that are, at minimum, 80% either Catholic or Protestant". It also states that 67% of Catholics and 73% of Protestants live in such areas. It further states that approximately "91% of estates in Belfast fall into the ‘very polarised' category, which [is] ... defined as having 80% or more single identity". Yet both communities face the same issues. When I expressed an interest in areas of multiple deprivation after my election, one of the invitations I received was from a group of young people who call themselves the Tigers Bay Ambassadors. They live in north Belfast, not far from Girdwood. We sat in their community centre, listening to under ten year olds say they did not know what they wanted to be when they grew up. We walked the streets, looking at dereliction, abandoned housing and the rest. We visited the small artificial surface where they kick a football. Then we turned a corner and straight ahead in the docks was the Titanic signature project, involving more than £90 million pounds of investment in their face, but Tantalus-like, because it is out of reach of their ambitions. The Tigers Bay Ambassadors are among the group of people who are most likely to under-achieve at school. OFMDFM established in 2002 and 2003 that this was the fact and Dawn Purvis’s taskforce confirmed nothing had changed almost a decade later. Boys from working class Protestant areas are most likely to under-achieve at school or, to put it another way, they are most likely to be failed by us.
Our answer is two-fold. First, stop trying to smash the part of the education system that delivers academic excellence. Grammar schools and academic achievement are not evil. Let us ask children a different question. Instead of asking them how intelligent they are and measuring it in the narrow academic sense of ability in English, maths and science, let us ask children in what way they are intelligent and be as respectful of ability in vocational, sporting and artistic spheres as we are of the academic. In that way each child can have their own development plan tailored to their individual spark of ability, creativity and talent. Second, and in conclusion, we need a single education system. We must merge four into one. That will be a huge challenge to the churches, the vested interests in education and to us, the politicians.
