Ms Louise Coyle:

I wanted to add that this project preceded the Brexit debacle. That is because community and grassroots organisations such as ourselves could see that these kind of activities were not priorities for our governments, including, I am afraid, the committee. Because there was no mechanism in place for us to engage at that level to get those issues across, Brexit has distilled for everyone how we took for granted that everything would be fine, we would all get along and it would be all grand. We now know that will not be the case and why it is so important to have defined and absolute structures in place that we follow, and that there are provisions in place to ensure that they happen. Goodwill visions and great hopes are all very well but one can see when it comes down to it that while we have our Good Friday Agreement, as Dr. Soares outlined, key bits of it have been neglected and not delivered upon. We should have had a Bill of rights for Northern Ireland which would have helped, certainly, our sector, quite a lot in the face of Brexit, but it is not there. It is about maintaining that energy to deliver on those matters. The fact is it was missing and that is why we started this work. We maybe were a bit prophetic. None of us wished for Brexit but could see that there were gaps in structural support and the energy and commitment by governments behind that structural support.

I was in front of the Tánaiste regarding the Brexit stuff. I said to him that I knew that politically things have to be done carefully but it is not political overreach to deliver on the Good Friday Agreement because the Government is co-guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement and, as such, has a responsibility to all of us as citizens to deliver on that. That is underneath many of the issues that we were raised in the charter.