Mr. Peter Osborne:

Time is running on but I will make a number of comments to pick up on the conversation so far. We could all speak for a considerable length of time because there are so many issues here. Galvanising the peace process involves a number of groups that receive funding from the Community Relations Council but it is much broader than that. It crosses sectors and includes organisations that are not directly affiliated or linked into the Community Relations Council in its funding role.

There is a huge discussion to be had about shared and integrated education. It is a very important conversation. One of the things I would throw into that conversation is making sure that when we talk about shared education we do not dilute it so much that we avoid dealing with the hard issues around politics, religion, sectarianism and racism. When all section 75 categories are included, there may be a temptation to deal with sharing on the less difficult issues and not on the more difficult ones but it is certainly a useful contribution to the debate to incorporate shared and integrated education.

One of the big issues around education, which was referred to by the CRC over a year ago in this committee in our peace monitor report from 2014, is to look at the huge educational underachievement in the Northern Ireland education system. A number of people have touched on that. There has been some very good achievement. There are high achievers but there is a huge amount of educational underachievement on both sides of the community, particularly within working class communities. It is very important that hope and aspiration about the future is central to the lives of young people. If, because of a lack of qualifications, young people do not look ahead, do not have hope and aspiration for themselves, and are told within their own communities that things are very wrong and broken, that there is no real hope for the future, then they will live in the present with a very negative outlook on what goes on around them. That takes them onto the streets. We need to invest urgently in the young people in those working class communities on both sides of the divide and try to invest in their futures in a way that does not mean that they have low educational achievement.

The reconciliation infrastructure has been touched on already but I want to put it into a little bit of context. People will very often say that over the past 17 or 18 years there has been huge investment in peace building and reconciliation work and there certainly has been significant investment. If one looks at it in the context of Peace IV coming up, a couple of hundred million pounds seems like a lot but spread over seven years and given the needs that exist in Northern Ireland it is not. If one looks at the amount of spending that represents on investment in reconciliation work in Northern Ireland, it is something like 0.1% of total spending.

We must have a serious conversation about whether we are seriously investing in reconciliation for the future. To put it in a slightly different context, in 2012 in Northern Ireland, £60 million of public money was invested in the Titanicbuilding. That is a good investment and it is an outstanding facility. It would take the Community Relations Council 30 years to spend that amount of money on funding organisations working on the ground, because we are allocated £2 million a year. We are the main regional body supporting reconciliation work. There comes a point where one has to ask if we are adequately prioritising reconciliation in Northern Ireland because we are not doing it when it comes to investment in communities. That infrastructure is disappearing. I talk to community organisations all the time. In the last six or seven months I have talked to one or two that are out of business and others that are going out of business. These are people who do critical work at interfaces and elsewhere. We are not sufficiently investing in that reconciliation infrastructure - 0.1% of total spend or £2 million is not enough for a regional funding body. It needs to be revisited.

The process has been described here as inspiring. What has come across to me in the galvanising process is the expertise, commitment, professionalism, experience, and capacity of people on the ground who do this work. In some ways it is the heartbeat of the peace process. The heartbeat is not in political terms. The peace process is ours - it is the people who voted for it and the people who do the work on the ground. The people here today and the dozens of other organisations involved in the galvanising process know what they are talking about and can communicate very well what the issues are, including the short-term and long-term strategic issues. The galvanising process shows that as we develop this peace process further and enter into a new phase of it - we are at a crossing point - the people who know what they are doing need to be heavily involved in making strategy and policy and delivering services. If we do not do that we will store up problems for the future.

I again thank the committee. The invitation is always there to come out and get involved in the process. The committee meets with many of these groups on a regular basis but the next time it is in Northern Ireland, not only Belfast, but other parts of Northern Ireland, including the rural parts, we will be happy to help facilitate those conversations. Some of these similar issues still exist there. There are interfaces that are relevant in rural areas, not only physically but in people's minds.