Dr. Neil Jarman:

I will pick up on a few points. As for the questions Deputy Ó Ríordáin raised on statistics and data, I do not know the statistics on young people's registration to vote. However, I recommend a report we have mentioned a number of times, namely, the peace monitoring report from the Community Relations Council, which was published yesterday and basically the data are up to date up to the end of February. It is a good compendium of some of the publications, research and work that has been done and which might give members some indication regarding some of the statistics on education, for example, that are being discussed in today's meeting.

In respect of paramilitarism, I was thinking slightly differently, with more of a focus on the older organisations that have been around throughout the conflict. A number of those organisations or sections thereof have been making moves towards demilitarising and civilianising and this has been dependent on funding to drive the process. Such funding has been haphazard and, in some cases, particularly in respect of the UVF, has come to an end. This is partly because those processes are being driven internally within the organisation and there has been no external stick or carrot with which to move matters along. There is a willingness within some sections of the aforementioned organisations to find a way of moving forward to the new political realities. However, in the absence of policy, they are left largely to their own devices. The policy would help to frame that and it perhaps would need some element of the stick approach, as well as a carrot. However, it is about holding some of those people to account and asking what are they still doing? They should be asked what is their rationale and justification 18 years after the ceasefires.

Mr. Mark Durkan raised the issue of MI5, which is one of those emerging issues that is beginning to be voiced and expressed. The Committee on the Administration of Justice, CAJ, drew up a report about covert policing. It was an issue that came up in the piece we did on public order policing last year, when people questioned the potential role of MI5. There is a suspicion there about what is going on, without necessarily people knowing very much about it. However, the suspicion feeds in and starts to undermine a sense that progress is being made and suggests there is another dimension of a two-tier form of policing.

One issue that cuts across much of what has been discussed this morning is perhaps there are differing expectations of both the Good Friday Agreement and the peace. Professor Hamber touched on this earlier in respect of the peace-building issue, where one has a notion of a positive peace or negative peace, with the latter being simply the absence of violence while the former comprises moving on towards more social justice issues and dealing with all the structural issues that underpinned the problems in the first place. I certainly agree with Professor Hamber that we have got a sense of a negative peace but I am not sure how far there is a commitment to push that through to a sense of a positive peace.

I am not sure that there is a clear understanding of what that positive peace would look like. On some of the points that were made about where we take this and whether there is the appetite for taking it further, I am not sure there is in some places. People are quite comfortable with an absence of violence. Some of the issues we have touched on today are the socioeconomic issues that are beginning to become more evident and will, in turn, have potential in a society which is deeply divided and fragmented, which has paramilitary organisations still present, where rioting is seen as broadly acceptable and where we know where one riot will be on 12 July. If one starts to pull all of those matters together, it has the potential, with the right set of circumstances, to undermine. We need a discussion on the long-term expectations of peace building and that brings one to the issue of the role of honest brokers and, potentially, the role of the committee.

Deputy Crowe asked what potential role a civic forum would have because there are elected political representatives. In some senses, I would see that civic forum as playing the same role as this committee could play or of some other form of honest broker. The Agreement and the peace process needs all the support it can get and it should not be merely left to the politicians elected in Stormont if other people can play a role. There are those roles of challenge - about where it is going, what one has done and what one has not done. It is providing support. It is nurturing the process through. It is holding the institutions to account, seeing what needs to be done. Bodies like this committee can play a role in taking that process forward.

I have two brief health points. Deputy Joe O'Reilly mentioned migrants. There is approximately 4% to 5% of A8 and minority ethnic communities in Northern Ireland. According to the 2001 census, there were fewer than 1% from those constituencies. We have seen a four to five-fold increase in non-white Northern Irish people in the past ten years. It is a fairly significant transformation. In my view, it is positive. It increases the diversity. It puts more perspectives in the public domain. It challenges people's mono and duo-culturalism. One interesting issue from the launch of this peace building report yesterday was that the person who got the highest marks in Irish language GCSE in Northern Ireland last year was a Polish national. They can play a positive role in it.

I do not know enough about the work in North-South bodies but if there is to be the Narrow Water bridge, can they please use the architect who designed the Boyne bridge rather than the architect who designed the Toomebridge?