Dr. Anna Bryson:

I wish to add a comment on gender. I suspect it will not be overruled. I wholeheartedly agree with the point raised by Deputy O'Sullivan, and it was also raised by Mr. Hazzard, that the Oral History Archive is a space where we could do a lot more around gender issues. Consider the witness statements that were collected in this jurisdiction in the late 1940s and 1950s and how profoundly they have influenced the writing of the history of the revolution and the Civil War period, and rightly so. It has provided really rich material. Some 8% of the statements were from women. When we consider how skewed and distorted some recollection can be, it brings in to sharp relief the importance of that type of collection. People do not line up outside the public records office. There will be no orderly queue formed that is duly representative of themes and patterns as mentioned, or representative of the experiences of women. A lot of work has to go in to actually making it happen.

Following on, if the Chairman does not mind, I would also link this back to Mr. Hazzard's query about international examples. I have spent a lot of time looking at what has been done in this regard in countries such as Croatia, and if there were models of such situations in the South African archive and so on that we could draw on. UN Special Rapporteur Pablo de Greiff, who was very keen that not been enough attention had been paid to the archive and so on, pointed me to a project in Galicia in Spain called Names and Voices. It has a distinct gender project within it. It is hard to find one project, other than knowing that the political interference in the top-down State-centric archives are not necessarily where we want to look to. I was looking for a model rather than a specific project. Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of things. A lot of good work has been done in collecting women's and families' stories. Some of it is becoming obsolete because there is nowhere for the material to be stored and it is in people's drawers.

Much powerful cross-community work is being done by community groups telling really important stories. A lot has been happening at community level. Perhaps part of what we need to look at is aggregator models, such as in the United States of America with the digitisation of the public library, which is almost like a franchise model, for example like McDonalds, with legal and ethical standards. Dr. Morrow is correct that there would be very specific professional standards. We would need specific standards around working with vulnerable people and victims. At the same time, one does not want to constantly reinvent the wheel. We want to find a way of working. A train the trainer module was part of that. This happens in transitional justice all the time with the collecting of new stories, but what about working with people and harvesting the statements? There is a fear by many of these organisations, whose funding is now being cut, that a big oral history archive in the public records office is like Tesco or Walmart coming to town. There is a terrible fear that we are going to be hoovered up. We need to be mindful of that. I did not find a specific project. In one of the articles I referenced I went through a number of different international projects and I critiqued them, but it is probably more instructive to look at some kind of model, such as the aggregator model used in the digitisation of the public libraries in the United States of America that enables us to work with and through existing groups.

We also have to acknowledge that a former RUC officer is going to be more comfortable telling his story to a former colleague who has been trained. We need to find ways of acknowledging that some victims want to talk to certain people who they trust, perhaps with and through their advocate support worker as we have proposed. All of this could be looked at. We could find a more sophisticated model that would enable us to do all of this. This came to mind when Deputy O'Sullivan spoke of the importance of collecting the stories of women. Some of this has already been done and we do not want to lose it.