Mr. Peter Osborne:

I am accompanied by Ms Jacqueline Irwin, chief executive officer, Community Relations Council, CRC, who has spent a lifetime working in promoting better community relations and on the reconciliation agenda in Northern Ireland. She is leading the CRC through a particularly challenging time, as well as an interesting and important time for Northern Ireland. Ms Sylvia Gordon is also a director of Groundwork Northern Ireland, an organisation that practices conflict transformation and peacebuilding through regeneration.Members of the committee will have visited Belfast several years ago and seen some of the excellent work she has led in working at interfaces and removing one of the interface barriers at Alexandra Park. It is incredibly challenging work. Mr. Tony Kennedy is a former chief executive of Co-operation Ireland. He has a lifetime of experience and, although he has retired from Co-operation Ireland, continues to work in a variety of initiatives promoting reconciliation in Northern Ireland and greater cross-Border co-operation. This wealth of experience reflects the wealth of experience that the CRC has as a whole and has been delivering for the past 25 years.
Reconciliation is a key element of the Good Friday Agreement, mentioned in paragraphs Nos. 2 and 3, with all parties committed to reconciliation in Northern Ireland, between North and South and on these islands. It is worth reading that agreement again sometimes as it is a visionary document that sets a high bar in challenging us all about future relationships on these islands. This was reflected in subsequent agreements. The St. Andrews Agreement, signed up to by all parties in the Northern Ireland Executive, referred to a society free from sectarianism and racism. We believe these are important and critical commitments which need to be followed through in policy and practice on the ground.
The third peace monitoring report published earlier this year made several points. It highlighted that the moral basis of the Good Friday Agreement may be evaporating; the absence of trust has resulted in an absence of progress; and the use of the police as human shock absorbers to deal with failure elsewhere. The report essentially stated several issues must be addressed to make reconciliation real for the long term. In this report, we wanted to highlight some of these issues, draw attention to them and challenge policymakers to ask what more can they do to make the reconciliation agenda on the ground.
The CRC welcomes the greater involvement of the two governments in recent weeks in pushing forward talks to address some of the critical political issues in Northern Ireland. That does not reflect the failure of local political parties, however. For many years, they have demonstrated significant and positive leadership. However, as guarantors of the Agreement, the two governments have an important role in Northern Ireland. The involvement they have now has been overdue for the past three years.
While that strategy and policy leadership at a political level is important, it is also important reconciliation is delivered from the ground up. Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, however, is entering a crisis point for several reasons. Part of it is because of the issues around political leadership, strategy and long-term support for the vision outlined in the Good Friday Agreement. That then is reflected in the resourcing of organisations important in that sector which can make it happen on the ground. There is a funding crisis with those groups that deliver this significant and important work. It is piecemeal, ad hoc, short term and not hitting the streets anywhere near quickly enough. It is also not enough. Central funding for reconciliation work within the Northern Ireland OFMDFM, Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, amounts to £13 million while the CRC distributes £2 million. Two years ago, £60 million of public investment was provided to a Titanicvisitor centre in Belfast. While it is a positive building which attracts many visitors, it would take the CRC 30 years to put that sort of investment into reconciliation and peacebuilding work. If we do not address reconciliation and peacebuilding, the children of the visitors we get to the Titanicbuilding now may not come back to visit in 30 years because we have not built the peace.

Building peace is a critical priority. When one looks at things like interface barriers, and others can talk much more cogently about this, there is a target to remove interface barriers by 2023 in the current programme for Government. There is some very good investment through the International Fund for Ireland and also perhaps from the peace programme next year. There will be a few million pounds going into the removal of interface barriers. It will focus on the hardware, replacing one fence with another fence. It looks better. That is very positive incremental work. To remove them, however, it is necessary to have investment in building relationships either side of those barriers. It is key for communities in those areas on either side to start to trust each other well enough to remove those barriers ultimately. I do not think any of us has any real knowledge of where the funding for that relationship building work will come from in the critical period from 2015 to 2020. If there is no investment in that work, the interface barriers will not be removed.
This relates to fulfilling the commitments in the Good Friday Agreement and other agreements to take reconciliation seriously and to resource reconciliation work. It needs to be resourced on a long-term basis and it needs to be outcome based. Groups, organisations and individuals - who show such courage on the ground undertaking the sort of work Ms. Gordon and many others do - should know that they are supported by Government and should be able to plan long-term. They cannot do that at the moment. Given the issues with funding, its scale and piecemeal and ad hoc nature, some of those groups will go under in the next few months or years. The infrastructure supporting reconciliation is in crisis. It also needs to be co-ordinated at a regional level, with a body at arm's length from Government, which would have the effect of removing it from the immediacy of the politics and economics within Government, supporting that sort of reconciliation work in the long term.
I know the committee visits Belfast regularly. I invite the committee on behalf of the Community Relations Council to come and meet those groups doing this reconciliation work on the ground, to hear them and take evidence from them directly, independently and impartially. We certainly would be happy to organise those meetings. As we want to embed peace and ensure we do not return to more violent times in years to come, it is critical we prioritise and properly resource the reconciliation work that is needed on the ground. It is not being resourced properly at the moment.