Ms Charmain Jones:

I work across rural Northern Ireland but I also worked in an urban setting for 15 years. I look at children and young people very much through the lens of how I was reared. I was born in 1976 so I call myself a child of the Troubles. Like Mr. Brady in Newry, I am a Portadown woman. I am, therefore, only 20 miles away from him. However, I was born and reared in an extremely sectarian town with a high level of violence. I have been able to look at my work with children and young people through that lens because most of the young people I deal with are under the age of 18. They are all peace agreement children. I am finding across the spectrum that there are kids who do not care about what is happening in Stormont or anything else. They feel they are engaging well with others and they are happy to continue with that. There are other young people for whom sectarianism and racism have an impact on everyday issues in their lives, including their schooling, how they get home from school, how they get bussed to school, what they do outside school and where they hang around after school, and that can be in an urban or rural context. In general, most young people, whether they say it or not, care about peace at some level. I was doing work with a group of 13 to 15 year olds recently and we were talking about the issues that affected them. While we take peace as a given, they also take it as a given, but they do not want to see violence similar to what we saw as young people.

Young people find it difficult to connect with the past. Last week I had to say to them that this is living history. They are being taught about this in school, but I was alive when these things happened and I am only 20 years older than them. It is hard for them to connect with what we are trying to do in talking about the past. Sometimes we put too much responsibility on them - fix the young people and Northern Ireland will be fixed. I was a youth worker for four years and I do not agree with that. I meet vibrant, energetic young people who want to move forward. We recently did a report with the Integrated Education Fund on community, housing and education. Young people said they wanted to learn together, connect together and do things together. They want shared classrooms, but the issue is funding. Shared education programmes are receiving less and less money. Over the past year, in particular, the level of contact between the youth and education sectors with young people has begun to shrink. If organisations such as ours are not doing this work, there will be less done within the school structures and the opportunities will shrink. Many people still live in segregated communities. There are walls in urban areas and I live at an interface. My children have no contact with anybody who has a different religion outside of my efforts to try to do that. They could continue to live like that for the rest of their lives if they wanted. They can live on that interface and never interact with anybody with a different religion. It is the same in rural areas. I work with young people in these areas who live two or three miles apart who would never connect if it were not for organisations such as ours going in to put in some resources and expertise to help them to mix together.

With our education system and the shrinking of the youth sector and the funding for children and young people, we could continue to live in a segregated, benign apartheid for the rest of our lives, but our sector is trying its best to give young people a hand in learning, sharing and engaging with each other as much as they can.