Ms Margaret Ritchie:

I thank my colleagues for attending. It seems that we shared a train together from Newry only a couple of hours ago.

Several serious issues are involved. I come from a position of strongly supporting the re-establishment of the Civic Forum for Northern Ireland and the North-South Consultative Forum. It is important that we view civic democracy as having an important contribution to make. People felt that they were silenced when the civic forum fell and the institutions were dissolved in 2002. The Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, OFMDFM, has steadfastly refused to publish its review of the civic and consultative forums. Could Ms Kelly, who served on the Assembly's OFMDFM committee, throw some light on these possible refusals?

I wish to make a couple of points about Deputy Smith's statement on the role of civic society in the Haass talks. Some 600 submissions were made. What role would the civic forum have in supplementing the work of the Assembly, the Executive and other Northern organisations and how would that tie in with the consultative forum? Too often, civic society feels silenced on many matters to do with the past, parades, contentious issues and wider issues, for example, health and education, in which respect Ms Kelly rightly stated that there was a chaotic situation. Civic society is good in terms of North-South work, as there are many common denominators. The political classes can learn from what civic democracy and civic society are telling us.