HC Deb 05 May 1988 vol 132 c1033 4.26 pm
Mr. Harold McCusker (Upper Bann)

I beg to ask leave to move the Adjournment of the House, under Standing Order No. 20, for the purpose of discussing a specific and important matter that should have urgent consideration, namely, the outcome of yesterday's meeting of the Anglo-Irish Conference. The matter is specific because yesterday's meeting dealt with the Gibraltar killings, extradition, terrorist cross-border racketeering, fair employment proposals, financial assistance to west Belfast, the murders of RAF personnel in Holland and the assurances that the Prime Minister has been seeking from the Dublin Government about their attitude to certain aspects of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Those are all issues of great significance, not just to the people of Northern Ireland, but to people in the United Kingdom and further afield.

The matter is urgent because, by this evening, the only people on the island of Ireland who will know nothing in detail about the discussions or their outcome will be the Unionist community in Northern Ireland, for whom these may well be matters of life and death. For two and a half years, the Northern Ireland Office has governed Northern Ireland by this hole-and-corner procedure, never once coming to the House to report on its dealings with the Dublin Government. In the interests of democracy, if nothing else, it should be stopped and we should make a new start this afternoon.

Mr. Speaker

The hon. Gentleman asks leave to move the Adjournment of the House, under Standing Order No. 20, for the purpose of discussing a specific and important matter that he believes should have urgent consideration, namely, the outcome of the meeting held yesterday in Dublin of the Anglo-Irish Conference. As the hon. Gentleman knows, my difficult duty in assessing applications under Standing Order No. 20 is to consider whether such an application should be given priority over the business set down for today and whether it meets the criteria. I regret to say that I cannot find that the matter that he has raised meets all those criteria and, therefore, I cannot submit his application to the House.