Professor Monica McWilliams:

A bill of rights is really a protection for both communities. No longer in Northern Ireland do we talk about majority and minority. Those days are over. We talk about reaching consensus, coexistence and inclusion but all of that is aspirational. This would create a foundation. We hit the nail on the head when we said the legacy of what people see in human rights is what creates a great deal of antagonism between the communities. The Unionist community predominantly looked to the civil rights movement and saw its progress as a stick over the head with which it was beaten saying it did not do enough.

The civil rights movement brought attention to those issues. The Unionists in turn would say, "Well, we have taken care of housing, voting and employment, which were the three key issues of the civil rights movements. Therefore we no longer need a human rights bill". They would also say that the Human Rights Act takes care of all that. One would now ask who will take care of those rights if that Act is to be removed.

Any additional rights from the Unionist community's perspective are probably to do with the right to process and some issues around property and ethnic cleansing and so on, which they felt had occurred during the Troubles. From the Nationalist side it is a great deal more. The Alliance Party, although in favour of social and economic rights, argues that it does not want them to be a dominant influence on the bill of rights, whereas Nationalists do see social and economic rights as being part of a modern-day bill of rights as the rights are interdependent. If we are going to have the right to vote, we need a right to accommodation and an address in order to vote. In other bills of rights this is the case but we make those rights progressively realisable depending on resources so there are limitations on them. That was also the case in South Africa as it is in Canada.

There was a misunderstanding that those rights would also become legal rights and that judges would be taking up the decisions of government. That is never the case for a bill of rights. Members ask why there is so little consensus both sides. Indeed, other people like ethnic minorities almost feel they were left out of this discussion, yet they see something and should see something in a future bill of rights. At the end of the day no government - not the Irish Government, the British Government or any other government - ever welcomes a bill of rights because it is about holding the government accountable. This proposal for a bill of rights came out of a peace agreement. It was asked that in the future, governments would be held accountable for their actions and that people could trust their government to be accountable irrespective of what shades of opinion made up its composition.