Mr. Mark Durkan, MP:

I also thank all three previous speakers for their very sharp presentations. Points have been made on a number of strands. The points made on education highlight a number of questions that need to be asked about the political structures. Mr. Francie Molloy touched on some of these, including the workings of the Assembly itself and the civic forum.

I have long believed that if we had not just retained the civil forum but developed it and allowed it to do what it was charged to do, to come up with the recommendations as to its own structure and working modalities in the longer term, the issue of education in relation to both the vexed question around academic selection and the dynamic towards more sharing of learning and better learning of sharing, we would be in a very different context. That is exactly the sort of issue that once it came up at the level of the Assembly, parties were seen to line up either for selection or against selection. It was seen that the Nationalist parties tended to be against selection and the Unionist parties tended to be for selection and it became absolutely brittle. There was no solution feasible for the Assembly because if a Minister were to put forward a legislative proposal for what he or she wanted to do, it would have been immediately cancelled out with a petition of concern.

Instead, any Minister wanting to pursue a policy had to do it by virtue of departmental guidelines, ministerial guidance, etc. That might be grand but once a different party gets that Ministry, then the guidance will be very different. This is an issue that needs to be settled by legislation so that schools and the systems know for a generation or more what they will be dealing with in order to plan and to order themselves. I also believe that settling the issue of academic selection in a positive, progressive way would have been one of the biggest releases for the integrated education offer. In the past, integrated education was often demeaned or whispered against as a choice of many parents on the basis that they were only choosing it because they were unsure if their children would get into the grammar school and they did not want to send them to the secondary school. It was the polite way of avoiding it. That was a terrible thing to say and it is a terrible smear. However, properly resolving the whole issue of academic selection in a way would have meant that schools would have to orientate and present themselves in different ways, in ways that would have created a drive for even more re-organisation with regard to the school estate. It would have opened up more, not just the offer of integrated education, but in terms of all of the other suggestions about how to have new shared learning spaces.

I refer to some of the difficulties about how the Assembly has not been allowed to operate as a legislative assembly and how, too often, policy issues that are serious public policy issues are simply privatised into the hands of Ministers. Because there is now just predictive use of petitions of concern, policy options are not even being tabled any more. The attitude is we cannot table that. It is as though people in the Assembly and in the Assembly committees are told there is no point asking about policy issues because the Executive has yet to decide. When the Executive decides something, there is no point in asking because the Executive has decided on it and all parties have agreed it and it cannot be disagreed. Mr. Francie Molloy's point is very similar to my own, that we are in a position now where we have an Assembly that appears to be accountable to an Executive rather than an Executive being accountable to an Assembly. When we were negotiating and designing the Good Friday Agreement our idea was that the Assembly would provide the opposition role in terms of scrutiny and challenge and that the Assembly and its committees would be prompted to provide that role by very good input from other sectors, from the different policy communities and partly from the civic forum. As alluded to by Dr. Neil Jarman, we hoped the civic forum would be a body that could actually do some policy out-riding work ahead of the Assembly and Departments, that it could look at some of the more difficult structural issues and maybe draw connections between what the Government might consider to be separate issues to be dealt with by separate Departments. The civic forum with its range of insights could perhaps see the connections between these issues and whether some issues are being held up by others. The civic forum began to give some glimpse of how issues could be considered in that way such as the issue of social inclusion and shared future issues. In my view there is real value at looking again at the issue of the civic forum not just in the North but also the consultative forum that was meant to exist as a North-South body. A consultative civic forum on a North-South basis can prove the case that there is sectoral neutral demand for better North-South co-operation and co-ordination and that it is not just something purely on the Nationalist agenda. It would prove and vindicate the case before it becomes a matter of political dispute that one side wants it and the other side is wary of it.

Despite all those little criticisms and frustrations we should not gainsay the point stressed by all three members that we now have a settled process. It is not a perfect environment; we will never live and work in laboratory conditions and we will have to cope with real life. I agree that we should not be complacent when turbulence is encountered but neither should we succumb to crash panic. Whatever the turbulence, we have machinery that can get us through it. However, we need to be thinking not just of the physics of how these arrangements work but also we need to pay more attention to the chemistry needed to make the agreement work so that it delivers and flourishes in the way it is meant to do.

The flags dispute raised questions about how the police were appearing to broker with certain people. It seems that local police commanders are too often advising people to talk to so and so in this or that local organisation or that political or politically related figure rather than to the police. This is not the sort of response people should be getting from police. It is not civic policing according to the ethic of Patten.

I refer to policing challenges arising from the implications of the Westminster justice and security Bill and more particularly from the crime and courts Bill. The justice and security Bill may have more implications for the courts and the issue of closed material proceedings to be used in cases of challenges to the state. These will raise fundamental issues in future. It is argued that it is going completely against the grain of Patten if NCA special constables are brought back in the North to operate on their own terms. That Bill even provides that some PSNI officers can be also NCA special constables while others may not be. This creates a possible difficulty of differentiation within PSNI as to different status. This is on top of the complications already there with regard to the MI5 role and the complaints many of us are receiving at constituency level about people in policing spaces being approached by people who have a different agenda which is a security service agenda beyond what is meant to be the PSNI remit. Those difficulties are there. I do not say this to detract in any way from the very significant progress made with regard to policing. The irony that none of us expected was that there was a period since the agreement when the one significant successful result of the agreement was the policing arrangements. The political arrangements were suspended. None of us would have expected that the policing arrangements were working in the absence of the political arrangements. Due to the quality of the policing leadership, including from people such as Peter Sheridan as well as the resolve of those who had committed to driving forward the new beginning in policing, this is what happened. This could be sustained for so long but other developments needed to happen to take things forward.

In a previous meeting of this committee we discussed the issue of the Bill of Rights. I made the point then that perhaps a robust, relevant and clearly articulated Bill of Rights might actually be an instrument that would give people better protection rather than merely relying on the negative vetoes built into the agreement. It may be a way of addressing some of the concerns evident in the flags dispute and at other levels as well. Based on our experience of the agreement and based on what we see as the shortcomings of how the politics or institutions are working, we can question what is the added value which a Bill of Rights might provide and what release might such a Bill provide for politics and the parties in order that they would not have to put themselves into corners with regard to some of these issues.