Irish Language legislation a ransom payment to Sinn Fein, Baroness Hoey tells House of Lords

Former Labour MP Baroness Hoey voiced her concerns as draft cultural legislation started its passage through the House of Lords, amid an impasse over forming a new Stormont Executive.

The DUP has said it will not nominate ministers until the UK government reforms the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Legislative protections for the Irish language were a key plank of the New Decade, New Approach agreement in 2020.

One of the strongest critics of the bill in the Lords yesterday was Baroness Hoey, who said: “It is called the Identity and Language Bill, but despite anything that anyone says … it is widely known as the standalone Irish language bill, with a little Ulster-Scots put on at the side as a bit of a sop to the small but articulate Ulster-Scots group in Northern Ireland.

“It is also very clearly a ransom payment to Sinn Fein for holding Northern Ireland hostage for three years when it brought down the Assembly.”

Warning it would be used by campaigners to “aid the eventual absorption” of Northern Ireland into the Republic, the non-affiliated peer added: “Of course, there are numerous formal and informal encouragements of the Irish language that could be done and practised, without bankrupting the Treasury in Northern Ireland, inconveniencing and alienating the population, and advancing one political party’s project to undo Northern Ireland. This bill is not one of them.”

DUP peer Lord Browne of Belmont said: “At the heart of New Decade, New Approach was a commitment to safeguard and protect Northern Ireland’s place within the internal UK market.

“To legislate on one or two parts of this agreement without urgently addressing this key element would be to approach New Decade, New Approach in an unbalanced fashion.”

Fellow DUP peer Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown said: “I do not support this legislation and it will not command the support of the unionist community from which I come.”

But former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, said the Irish language need not be weaponised.

Lord Murphy highlighted the teaching of Welsh in his native country and said: “I just think that everybody ought to calm down a bit and realise that things can happen, which aren’t going to be so difficult that it’s going to mean something which weaponisation of the language would imply.

“It’s not like that. It can be like that. But if you deal with it properly and sensitively then indeed it needn’t be.”

He added: “The principle of this legislation is such that both communities are protected.”

While agreeing the protocol had to be addressed, Lord Murphy said it underlined the need for the devolved institutions to be up and running in Northern Ireland “in order to deal with all these difficult issues”.

He said: “If you suddenly disagree with a policy in this House of Lords we don’t suddenly dissolve Parliament because we don’t agree with the policy. We have to deal with it. Intensive negotiation is the only real answer to all this.”

Responding, Northern Ireland minister Lord Caine said the issues of language and identity had served to “poison and paralyse” politics in the region.

He said: “One of the aims of this Bill, frankly, is to deal comprehensively with language and identity issues that does allow the sting to be taken out of them, allows them to be depoliticised and prevents them from paralysing politics in the way they have previously.”

Rejecting “scares” levelled by critics, Lord Caine added: “It contains provisions for all parts of the community.”