Mr. Derek Poole:

In respect of the paramilitary issue, which is the easiest one, it is worth starting by saying that we came to the Good Friday Agreement as a deeply hurt community. It was a profoundly hurt community that was traumatised through all the layers of society. You had to have lived through it to understand the coping mechanisms that were developed even by people who were not necessarily living in areas in which the violence was acute. Nevertheless, the kind of psycho-social adjustments one had to make to accommodate the abnormality of that protracted internecine war were such that we eventually learned to live with abnormality and live with it to such a degree that we did not know what normal was. The choreography of that still exists not just in our psyche but in our very body language and movements. A recent study showed that when a generation of young schoolchildren who were not even born when the Good Friday Agreement was signed were coming home from school, they still walked ten minutes via a longer route they no longer needed to walk. The choreography of sectarian division written on the very landscape of coming home and going to school was still part of the unconscious narrative of how people lived.

We cannot think of the issue of paramilitarism without understanding that the context of the peace process involved tens of thousands of men and women who belonged to paramilitary organisations and who throughout the protracted conflict saw their identity, sense of supporting the cause, ideology or pro-British or pro-Irish positions defined by the kind of structures the paramilitary formations provided. To a large degree, we came into the peace process with no idea about how all of that would be addressed. Of the three things that were essential for the peace process, the first was the end of hostilities. That is always the beginning of something. The other was an overarching political canopy whereby people felt their voice was represented at political and Government level. The third was what to do in the community with the hate, hurt, trauma, fallout, victimhood, the consequences of all of that violence and the threats and fears that became normative. We have been working with that at community level for decades and to a large degree and for various reasons, Government has not been able to address that or not necessarily able to meet us halfway in that healing process - not least in terms of funding and support. It is doing its best but to a large degree, it is working with the big overarching political dimensions of parking the constitutional question and stabilising the politics. The community sector has been working in that vacuum and looking at the issues of hate, hurt, reconciliation, healing and even concepts of forgiveness and truth telling - all those things that are not cerebral but that have a relational and emotional dimension. The paramilitary issue is one of those themes.

I know this is representative of the entire panel. Everyone of us around this table believes the culture and infrastructure of paramilitarism is no longer justifiable in any shape or form and that unaccountable authority is unacceptable in the kind of democracy we want to build. We certainly believe that any organisations that get their way through any form of emotional or physical threat are unacceptable to our society. We want to be nuanced about this by saying that paramilitaries did not arrive in our context like aliens on a spaceship. They are our community and are embedded in the reality of our streets, families, institutions and structures. Paramilitaries are not something that is not us. They are our brothers and fathers. They were predominantly men but they are our sisters. They are our neighbours. They are people who defended us or threatened us, depending on your ideology. I was put out of my home at gunpoint by the IRA one night and moved across town into a house from which a Catholic family had been put out at gunpoint by the UVF. In that internecine experience of paramilitarism, ironically, we found ourselves living the very same experience of fear, threat and vulnerability.

The issue of paramilitarism must be addressed as an embedded community, not a set of aliens. It must also be nuanced about, to put it in the vernacular, good gatekeepers and bad gatekeepers. Paramilitarism is not one thing. It is a very complex phenomenon and legacy of the conflict that must be addressed with creativity and imagination. Of course, it has become a weapon or tool for demonising people in one way both at political level and at community level. The issue of demobilisation and the more complex issue of "civilianising" the psyche need subtle, sensitive, careful and generous engagement, particularly with community practitioners who are the ones who often work with paramilitary institutions and organisations. The issue is one of not demonising those who find themselves involved in paramilitarism for all kinds of complicated reasons and yet paradoxically, against that is the issue of accountability, justice, victimhood and truth telling. All of those things are being juggled at the moment as we address the phenomenon of paramilitarism.

In particular, I want to say something about the gatekeepers. They are people with a paramilitary background who have the reputation of controlling an area. They are gangsters. There is no doubt about that. The issue of how the PSNI with its limited reserves addresses that and how the community stops looking to those structures to police the area and to deal with antisocial behaviour is complex. However, there are also gatekeepers from paramilitary backgrounds who have been doing community work, albeit sometimes through a paramilitary structure, that is a genuine attempt to do good in that community, to put things right and to address the legacy of the past.

I would also like to say something about loyalist paramilitaries because, to a large degree, loyalist paramilitarism has manifested itself in a particularly unique way, in a way that has shown all kinds of paranoia, insecurity and vulnerability about the political changes that have gone on. Loyalist paramilitarism, and loyalism as a phenomenon in general, has been badly served and profoundly misrepresented and misunderstood. As early as 1974, loyalist paramilitaries in the Maze Prison and through the PUP were writing a Good Friday agreement and maybe even a better version of it. Billy Wright and others were delivering a peace process and were looking for a way out of the internecine conflict that history had helped create for us. There is something about. In the past few weeks, the Loyalist Community Council said: "We want paramilitarism to go away. We want to end these structures and habits from the past and these ways in which we do community work but we need help in that. We need certain reassurances, and support." The demonisation of loyalism, in particular, needs to stop. We need to find a way to bring that voice as an intelligent political and cultural identity into the process and, therefore, we must be careful, when we address the issue of paramilitarism, that we do not fall into black and white answers. We need a nuanced, imaginative and courageous engagement with those structures and we need to do it out of a recognition that these people are part of our society and our neighbourhoods. The inclusion, while addressing issues that are unacceptable, of the people who are part of the paramilitary structure and culture is absolutely vital.