OpinionThere have been more than a few oddities in the debates at Westminster about anti-terrorism legislation. But perhaps the oddest to a Belfast eye will always be the rich tapestry of the Northern Ireland peerage, a weave so fantastic and multifaceted it bears no resemblance to politics back home, past or present. The chamber awaits an ennobled Democratic Unionist, and will never be graced by a nationalist: otherwise variety runs wild, writes Fionnuala O Connor
The Guardian's sketchwriter Simon Hoggart compared the Lords the other day to hyenas feasting on the terrorism bill - which seemed a little harsh - and singled out the Viscount Brookeborough. Brookeborough of Fermanagh? He it was, scion of the long-ago Stormont premier Basil, not known for his liberal tendencies.
Here was the current viscount criticising the Blair government's proposals in a manner that would have brought a blush to old Lord Brookeborough's weather-beaten cheeks. Families, he said, would not believe or understand what was being done to their sons.
Given the emergence of Michael Howard as the unlikely champion of civil liberties, perhaps not so surprising, but a reminder all the same that this is truly "another place" from Northern Ireland, as well as from the Commons.
For those peers nominated for services to unionism this has the attraction of being a nationalist-free zone, too: the closest approximation being Lord Fitt, who as plain Gerry had his head split by an RUC baton in Derry on October 5th, 1968, and kept his rusty bloodstained shirt for years in a filing-cabinet drawer to awe unwary interviewers.
In that incarnation Gerry Fitt was a unionist hate-figure, the man with a battered old suitcase full of documented inequities who blitzed Mary Holland, for one, into coming to unionist-dominated Northern Ireland to see for herself. But Lord Fitt long ago denounced the SDLP, the party he once led, as having ditched any pretension to socialism and become too green by half.
The most convivial of men when not discussing politics back home, Lord Fitt sometimes lunches journalists now with the Lord Laird of Artigarvan who, as Stormont hardliner John Laird, helped make Terence O'Neill's life a misery.
A latter-day supporter of David Trimble, Lord Laird is famous for his championship of Ulster-Scots and even more for his distinctive kilt-wearing, which he explained, after a recent harsh official audit, had called for considerable expenditure on taxis, kept waiting while he attended functions, to ensure his security.
These two may be the most colourful of the Northern peers, though by name alone the gloriously titled Baroness Blood relegates most belted earls to the shadows.
Sole NI female representative in the chamber, and perhaps the only peer with real knowledge of and affinity with a loyalist working-class district, the baroness sits on the Labour benches.
True to her trade-union roots as veteran shop steward May Blood, she promotes integrated education when and where she can, and works hard to keep in contact with the family support centres she helped establish in the Shankill to counter the UDA's appeal.
Then there are the Northern Ireland law lords, the Church of Ireland Archbishop, Lord Eames, and a brace of splendidly different merchant princes. Baron Rama of Malone was once Diljit Singh Rana, first honorary Indian consul in Northern Ireland and a hotel-owner who plunged into investment in the trade when the Europa was giving out ties to residents who had experienced their 30th bomb blast.
The Lord Ballyedmond, formerly Edward Haughey, founded the veterinary drugs company Norbrook in Newry, in another life was a senator in Dublin, has recently been a member of Ulster Unionist delegations and is acknowledged by Michael Howard in his Westminster declaration of financial interests as having contributed to the opposition leader's expenses on helicopter travel.
As the hyenas scavenged, the raft of former Northern secretaries of state who still inhabit the Lords must have entertained conflicting emotions. Comparatively recent Hillsborough incumbent Lord Mayhew criticises the current proposals: as attorney general Sir Patrick he ruled that prosecutions indicated by the Stalker investigation should not proceed because they would endanger national security.
Way back in 1974 Baron Merlyn-Rees presided over the introduction of the new prevention of terrorism legislation, which allowed people to be deported from Britain to both the Republic and Northern Ireland. There were protests that this would turn Northern Ireland into a "Devil's Island".
The Lords will always be unthinkable for nationalists, presumably. But the DUP, main unionist party at last, must surely be close to a nomination. Having confounded so many summations of his career, Baron Paisley of Ballymena might yet be entirely at home in the place the hale, though aged, Lord Callaghan of Cardiff once memorably christened "Heaven's Waiting Room".