Ms Louise Coyle:

I am the director of the Northern Ireland Rural Women’s Network, NIRWN, and thank the committee for taking the time to listen to us today. NIRWN is a grassroots membership organisation which responds to its members' needs. Our overall mission is to try to influence key decision-makers through providing a voice and representation for rural women, ensuring their equal and valued position in society. NIRWN seeks to increase the voice of rural women at a policy level; to advocate and lobby on behalf of rural women; to provide information and networking opportunities; to pilot innovative projects such as this one; and to hold statutory bodies to account to measure the impact of their decisions on rural women. We do this, among other things, through advocacy, organising local and regional networking events, providing an information service to Government Departments, and supporting any organisations that wants to link with rural women, to hear what they need and what their concerns are. NIRWN is also a partner organisation in the North as part of the Women’s Regional Consortium, which consists of seven women’s sector organisations that have come together to try to provide a voice for women from disadvantaged and rural areas. We are the rural element of that, as the other organisations are based in Derry-Londonderry and Belfast. It is critical that we get rural women at the table, and our centres and groups work in partnership with each other for the needs of women regionally.

NIRWN has been engaged in the Towards a New Common Chapter initiative because it is a grassroots effort to build and develop co-operation across our islands. As Ms Farrell said, Brexit has brought home very clearly how imperative that is, and the implications we are dealing with now of not having had that in place. Taking account of historic barriers, there is a lack of parity and gender representation across our island and women have certainly been historically invisible in the North. Even their peace-building as part of the Good Friday Agreement has been largely written out of our recent history.

The development and emergence of community and civic leaders, taking collective action to break silence, and to share space, for the greater good, requires leadership from within, as well as encouragement and support from external agencies and governments. Community development offers active and potentially active individuals a process and a route they can use to lead and facilitate collective visioning and action. Building peace in our rural areas and communities is all about supporting the processes that lead to an absence of violence, conflict, and fear, as well as flourishing economic, social and political justice in our rural areas, peaceful co-existence and the shared democratic use of power. Even physically, rural people are further away from the decision-making spaces, and it is much harder to get one's voice and issues heard on how one experiences differences and change in one's area. It is imperative that women in rural areas are listened to and supported so their historic invisibility is not mirrored in our post-conflict society.