Debate contribution: Justice Bill: Consideration Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Paul Givan on 16 June 2026.

MLA

Mr Paul Givan

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

16 June 2026

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Justice Bill: Consideration Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5624495

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Let me respond to my colleague. He is right to highlight the issue about the framework. Even if the framework were to be developed, broader society and certainly our schools would need to be confident that it was robust, that it could be effective and that it would be a replacement that was a credible alternative before the Youth Justice Agency or the PSNI would be withdrawn from getting involved in serious incidents, which, regrettably, do take place in our schools. It is one thing to have a framework, but it is another thing for the sector to have confidence that it represents a better approach. The framework would need to be tested long before we would think about removing what I have called the backstop for dealing with serious offences that occur. My party will take, first and foremost, a victim-centred approach to this. That will be the default position. When an incident happens, what are the rights of the victim? That takes precedence over any rights of the perpetrator. That is why, in extremis, we want to retain the age at 10. That is why we did not have support for this at the Executive. Our Ministers were able to use our position. We were not going to support it. That is why we sought to use whatever mechanism was available to us to protect against the change to the law. Strand one of the Belfast Agreement refers to safeguards. The paragraph on safeguards talks about the petition of concern. It does not prescribe the circumstances in which the petition of concern is constrained. It says that, as a safeguard, a cross-community vote can be applied to "key decisions" through a petition of concern. That is the test, when it comes to applying the petition of concern. My party put the petition of concern in the Business Office well over a week ago. It was out there, publicly, and we said that that was what we were doing. We appealed to other Members to join us. The TUV joined us — I appreciated that. We continued to call for others to join us. That was well known and, largely, unremarked upon by anybody else in the Chamber, in the hope that there would not be sufficient signatures. Then Mr Chambers and others joined us, and we got the 30 signatures. That is when we got the response that we heard last night. That response was more indicative of an attitude of how people want to have majority rule and not seek the consensus that the Belfast Agreement sought to create within the Executive and Assembly. We ought to strive towards getting consensus on a cross-community basis. It may not always be possible for us to achieve that. We have the mandatory coalition, which is difficult to navigate, and we have an Assembly with many political opinions, but we should seek to get consensus. At times, I have had to water down my ambition in legislation in an attempt to get consensus. I have had to do it: I have had to compromise. Those who know me know that I do not like to compromise, but there are times when we have to do it. There have been times when I have had to do it at the insistence of the Alliance Party and others. We put down that petition of concern. I appreciate that others disagree, but, in our view, that was the right thing to do. If people are now saying, "Never more can we ever seek cross-community votes in the Assembly", let them bring forward legislation where the default for passing the Budget, for example, which affects all our citizens equally, is an automatic cross-community vote and not one triggered by a petition of concern. However, that is not the basis of the Belfast Agreement. It is about consensus politics. When others were not in the ascendancy and did not have a majority, all those safeguards were core tenets of the Belfast Agreement that were never to be given up. However, when the shoe is on the other foot, they feel that all those safeguards ought to be disbanded. We are not going to make progress by seeking to exclude people, particularly those on these Benches from the unionist community.

714 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:53 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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