Mr. Michael Culbert:

I would deal mostly with those issues. The situation is that shortly after the Good Friday Agreement, anyone with a prison record could not get home or car insurance cover. Our work involved digging in and trying to find insurance brokers who would find insurance companies that were willing to insure people who had been in prison for political charges. We have been relatively successful but the problem is we had to go looking. We have lists of brokers and insurance companies who will now interact with us but that is the product of a lot of hard work. People were quite simply lying to insurance companies or not telling them they had a prison record and then when something awful happened, they were faced with the reality that they had been paying insurance premiums but were not covered. We have been consistently trying to get the word out but it is not easy. Not everybody is tied into our network but we have been trying to get the word out because these issues affect all of the political ex-prisoner community. In terms of the simple example of insurance, we now have lists of the insurance companies that will provide insurance for our people in different offices throughout the country. It is easier, strangely enough, for political ex-prisoners in the North to get insurance cover than it is for those in the South.

There is a range of other situations which cause difficulties, including employment situations. We have been able, in the North, to establish guidelines for employers who are employing people who have been in prison for political charges. That has come about because legally employers can opt not to employ us even though we might be qualified for the employment. The head of the civil service, trade unions and employers' organisations were all involved with us in drawing up the policy guidelines, which was very helpful. We have been able to make major inroads, thanks to the strength of that working group which was set up in Stormont. It is called the Stormont working group. There are no politicians involved. Civil servants are in charge of it, along with ourselves and it has been quite effective in bringing about change. It gave great assistance to my organisation, Coiste. We took Peter Robinson to court and beat him two years ago because as Minister for Finance, he had issued an order that political ex-prisoners were not to be employed because they had to be subjected to the access checks that civil servants would go through for very high level jobs. A man who was a litter collector was put out of a job because of his imprisonment. We took his case to court and we won because of the ridiculousness of having to get high level security clearance to pick up litter. That has changed the atmosphere somewhat with employers in the North. The Stormont working group, which was set up after the St. Andrew's agreement, has been effective and it is great to see that. Unfortunately, however, we do not have a similar structure in the Twenty-six Counties.

These are just some examples but I will not bore the committee with any more. Suffice to say, in almost every aspect of life, we can be legally put aside and not treated the same as other citizens. We do not want superior treatment or to be put above anyone else. We would like to be treated as ordinary citizens but unfortunately that is not happening. We have people living in rural areas, for example, who cannot get weapons licences to control vermin. We have people who cannot even get licences to work as security personnel on doors or to work on building sites. All aspects of our daily lives are affected. All we want is that consideration be given to us, as a very important part of the Good Friday Agreement. That agreement is the cornerstone of our peace process and we would like consideration given to the implementation of the parts that affect us.