Mr. Michael Culbert:

Is onóir mór domhsa a bheith anseo chun labhairt leis an Coiste seo. I am pleased to be invited to make representations on behalf of the former IRA prisoners who were imprisoned during the conflict between Ireland and Britain. Accurate figures are very difficult to obtain because the British Government indicates to us that it does not know and we had to carry out our own research. We reckon that somewhere in the region of 20,000 men and women were imprisoned worldwide due to IRA-related activities.

I have sent to the committee an outline of the issues which relate to the political ex-prisoner community in general. I would say that the political ex-prisoner community is "discriminitable", if that is a proper word, in both jurisdictions North and South. We are one of the few groups I am aware of that can be legally discriminated against. That is a problem. All we want is equality of citizenship on the island.

The war is over. The IRA has gone. The political prisoners were released but 17 years after the Good Friday Agreement we remain second-class citizens on the island of Ireland. We can be legally discriminated against and legally denied all goods and services - that means any goods and services within the North and we have no recourse. We consider this unjust and we lobby consistently against this attempted retrospective criminalisation of us, our actions and motivations.

I am here to urge the committee to do what it can to bring to an end this process of bringing our pasts to the fore while so much of the British state's responsibilities are being ignored in Dublin and in Westminster. I urge the committee to adopt or at least acknowledge the role of the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration, DDR, framework. I do not know if the committee is aware of the process - disarmament to form groups, re-engagement in the communities and the reinsertion of the groupings into society - which is adopted throughout the world at the end of conflicts. I urge the committee to try to bring all the combatants in from the cold. We were not and are not the stereotypes which the media portrayed us as.

We have terminated the armed conflict which we once considered essential. We are fully supportive of the peace process and work tirelessly at the coalface to prevent violence, be that from sectarianism or disaffected republicans. Those who would criticise or demonise us for our past do not enter those current fields of conflict. We do and in doing so we work closely with various agencies, including the police.

We have been consistently forthright in our condemnation of those who wish to terminate the political and peace process. Many within my community have been criticised for selling out on the armed conflict. We can cope with that but we are being constantly deprived of our resources to continue with our work, be it the gap in European Union funding which was of great assistance to the work we did throughout the island for a decade or the more recent refusal by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to fund a core group to keep our services going throughout the country. We have done and will continue to do our work on a voluntary basis.

I seek the committee's help to reinstate me and thousands of others as equal citizens in this country. Please assist us. In addition, if members can find any way in any measure to assist us with any funding to continue our work, we will be grateful.