Mr. Peter Sheridan:

Deputy Carey asked about the challenges for the peace process. We have been through some of them. One of the challenges relates to funding. I will come back to Senator Ó Donnghaile's question in this regard. When we speak about the fragility of the peace process, we are not suggesting there is a threat that all of this will break out again. It is not going to break out again. Nevertheless, for each of the last two Christmases, the Secretary of State and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade have had to hunker down to try to get relations going again because the Executive was on the verge of collapse. There is still a great deal of work to be done in this respect.

Deputy Carey also asked about the work that is being done behind the scenes. Some of this can lead to frustration. I doubt that very many people in this room are aware that we brought 5,000 young people from 400 schools across Northern Ireland to the Maze-Long Kesh on 21 September last to mark the UN International Day of Peace. I will not ask those present to indicate whether they were aware of this. A further 2,000 young people participated at five satellite venues, one of which was as far south as Cork. The events at the Maze-Long Kesh were beamed live on the Internet. Young people from 22 other countries throughout the world were beamed in so that they could take part in these events, which focused on the role of young people in building peace. We started our work on this project approximately a year ago. The Executive Office, which was known at the time as OFMDFM, took a risk with this and funded it. None of us knew where it would go, but it worked incredibly well.

At the end of last year, the UN passed Security Council Resolution 2250. This historic resolution relates to the role of young people in building peace. That is what we have been doing. The UN youth ambassador contributed to our event. The need for this work, which is continuing, brings me on to Senator Ó Donnghaile's question about PEACE funding. Of course there has to be continued PEACE funding, not because there is a threat of violence breaking out again - that is not why we are saying this - but because sectarianism, which is the breeder of violence, is alive and well in Northern Ireland. People in the Republic of Ireland sometimes think there is no sectarianism here. That is true until one scratches the surface. Then one has a different viewpoint and realises there is plenty of sectarianism around.

Sectarianism is still alive and well with us. I will give some examples. Some 95% of social housing in Northern Ireland is segregated. There is little chance that is going to change any time soon. Our education system is segregated. Just 5% of kids go to integrated schools. That is not going to change any time soon because parents have a right to choose. A few years ago, the Institute for Conflict Research published a paper on the number of peace walls in Northern Ireland. We prefer to call them "walls of division". There were 18 of these walls before the Good Friday Agreement, but there were 88 of them at the time when the paper was published. That means 70 walls had been built since the Good Friday Agreement. Some of them are termed "security obstacles" or "barriers". They are not called "peace walls". The point is that we have put barriers between communities, our housing is segregated and we send our kids to separate schools.

There is a lot of work yet to be done in the peace process. When Bertie Ahern was on the board of Co-operation Ireland, he used to look down the table at me when I said this, so I have to be careful. The Good Friday Agreement was largely about agreeing on a system of government and the institutions of government. What it delivered in respect of Stormont was an agreement for the first time ever about how we were going to be governed on this island and these islands. We got there. We are now in a period of trying to work out how to underpin the political deal by normalising relationships between Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and internally within Northern Ireland. I think it will take another 25 or 30 years to do this considerable amount of work. I do not share the notion that this will somehow go away because Europe has stopped or we have moved out of Europe.

To some extent, the Good Friday Agreement took the view that peace was about an absence of violence. It was predicated on the idea that if a way could be found to get the IRA to stop, then the loyalists would stop. We do not see peace as being about an absence of violence. We see peace as a place where people can learn to live together like citizens. That takes a considerable amount of time in the post-conflict environment. Various issues, including the legacy of the past, are still outstanding. While the institution at Stormont is functioning, it is still being built. We have only recently had the development of the Opposition there. It is still a pretty immature place. There is still a lot of work to be done there. We do not want to settle for communal division or some sort of separatism. That is why the work has to go on.

I have set out the arguments we need to make to the British and Irish Governments. It is not the case that people are going to take out guns again because of this. There may be some people who would walk in that direction if we gave them an opportunity to do so. We should not make it too obvious for them with what we do around the Border. The rest of it - all the outstanding issues - is much more important. That is our argument for continuing PEACE funding, regardless of whether it is called PEACE V or something else.