Northern Ireland’s peace deal cannot be “negotiated away” by British political figures who want to see the UK quit the European Convention of Human Rights if elected, the Irish tánaiste has warned.
The ECHR is an integral part of the 1998 Belfast Good Friday agreement and withdrawal would remove those foundations of peace, according to Simon Harris, Ireland’s deputy prime minister.
“The ECHR’s guarantees cannot be negotiated away, despite what some politicians might claim,” he will tell the British Irish Association conference in Oxford on Friday.
He will add that the ECHR was a “fundamental safeguard” and a “core part” of the agreement reflecting both countries’ shared role as guarantors of the 1998 peace accord.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK party leader; Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary; and Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, are among the most prominent politicians who have advocated to leave the ECHR. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative party leader, has also said she would look into it.
Harris will also reveal that the UK and Irish governments are to appoint an independent expert panel to try to end the “scourge” of paramilitary violence and intimidation that has dogged pockets of Northern Ireland society since the peace agreement more than 25 years ago.
The expert panel will report back to both governments in 12 months after examining whether there is merit in a “structured process” to disbandment, a process similar to that which led to the disarmament of republic and loyalist groups after the 1998 Good Friday agreement.
“I believe this is a process that can potentially draw the history of paramilitarism in Northern Ireland to a close,” Harris will say, adding that he was aware that there were those that opposed the appointment of the experts and he respected their view.
“But 27 years after the Good Friday agreement, paramilitarism has not gone away. What I do know, though, is that Northern Ireland has lived with the scourge of paramilitarism for far too long,” Harris will say.
The decision to leave paramilitary groups out of the Good Friday agreement has frequently been criticised as a mistake because it allowed a level of criminality that does not exist in the rest of British or Irish society to continue.
Harris said paramilitarism had blighted about a fifth of the communities in Northern Ireland, insinuating its way into multiple aspects of life.
Last year, the harm caused by paramilitaries was described as an “enduring and malignant legacy of the Troubles” by the UK parliament’s Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (NIAC)
Consisting of both republican and loyalist groups, they include organisations involved in organised crime and criminality, intimidation in housing, coercive control of victims and survivors of paramilitary violence and illegal money lending.
The NIAC found the recent cost of living crisis contributed to a “cruel storm” with paramilitaries exploiting and targeting vulnerable groups including single mothers in precarious financial situations.
“We need to explore every credible avenue – so that the over 20% of Northern Ireland’s population that report that paramilitaries exert control in the areas that they live can begin to live their lives without the intimidation, fear, coercive control and violence that they experience on a day to day basis,” said Harris.
