I and my Unionist colleagues will, of course, oppose the Bill. I understand the feelings of those who have lost loved ones and whose relatives were brutally murdered by the IRA and buried in unknown graves. Over the years, there has been pressure on the organisations concerned to say where those people were buried. As a result of that pressure, the IRA claims to have set up an investigation team that has identified the whereabouts of nine bodies. It seems to me that public pressure has forced the IRA to go that far. We must remember that many of the victims belonged to the nationalist community and that the pressure comes from that community. If that pressure continues, the IRA will eventually have to say where the bodies are. This Bill again lets the IRA off the hook.

The IRA will not announce where the bodies are because it wants to be told that, if any evidence is got from the bodies, its members will not be charged or have that evidence used against them in a court of law. They should not be allowed to get away with that because it is not right in a democratic country to amend the criminal law to let such people off the hook. The IRA has only to issue a statement giving the location of the bodies. The security forces and other authorities could then deal with the situation as they normally would. There is no necessity for a Bill.

The Bill is ill-considered and not fully thought out. The relatives of those who have been murdered will be given less information in the event of the bodies being discovered than they would have got if the normal course of events took place. The Bill is therefore unnecessary.

I also oppose the Bill because it sets up another all-Ireland implementation body. One member of the commission will be appointed by the United Kingdom and the second by the Republic of Ireland. Why is that necessary? It seems that there is a possibility that a body will be found in the Republic of Ireland. There is sufficient law in the Republic of Ireland, and sufficient communication between it and the United Kingdom, adequately to deal with that without setting up another cross-border implementation body.

For those of us who are Unionists, this is another clear example of how the Government are not committed, as they should be, to the Union. In Northern Ireland, we have de facto joint authority. Almost any decision of importance must be agreed by Dublin, which has to have its nose in almost everything in Northern Ireland. For all those reasons, I believe that the Bill should not pass. My party will oppose Third Reading.