Clause 50 - Law Commission
Justice (Northern Ireland) Bill
3:45 pm
Mr Edward Garnier (Harborough, Conservative)
I hope that the Minister will resist the amendment. It may have been moved with good intentions and a better understanding of the sociological, cultural and political difficulties that have historically affected Northern Ireland than I can bring to bear, but we must be careful of linguistic confusion. In many discussions in this and other Committees, the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire has provided light, as opposed to heat, but I fear that he has fallen into some error.
On the simple grounds of numerical representation, I urge the Government to reject the amendment. The hon. Member for North Down said that there were 8,000 or so Chinese people in Northern Ireland, and I am sure that she is right. If so, they can under no circumstances represent 20 per cent. of the population of Northern Ireland. Let us pursue that example. It would be impossible for the appointers of the commission to do as the amendment asks and ensure
that the members of the commission are representative of the ethnicity of Northern Ireland. To extend the point to its silliest, someone is either one of those 8,000 Chinese people or not. No man or woman on the commission can be representative of the percentage of the population of Northern Ireland made up of those 8,000 people.