Mr. Francie Molloy:

I welcome Reverend Karen and Mr. Lunn to this important debate. It is good to hear voices of different angles and it is very important to have them at a meeting of this committee.

Reverend Karen talked first about neighbours and I think that the neighbour issue is very important. Although I live within what is termed "the murder triangle" I always found that my neighbours worked together. It is a farming community where neighbour helped neighbour and it did not matter from what religious domination they came from, so neighbours is a very important issue. I remember one unionist man saying to me that, for him, the land was the most important thing. Whether you called it British or Irish, his 200 acres of land were more important to him than anything else. He wanted to work it and live it, and it is very important we have that within the rural community.

What both Mr. Lunn and Reverend Karen advocated for and it came across very well was strong leadership. What we need is strong leadership. People keep saying that now is not the time and we must wait and get everybody on board before we start. If we had everybody on board we would be well down the road at this stage. If civil rights campaigners had waited until everyone came on board before starting to look for rights, then we would not have got them. That is more than 50 years ago, so things do move slowly whenever we get into this situation. This is now the time to make the most of and build on the investments of the past, particularly European investment, in building community structures, infrastructure and all that exists.

It is very important that we get a unionist voice into discussions. People talk about having the right structures in place but I think you can be too structured so we need more informal discussions. Someone asked me a while back would I talk to a number of unionist politicians and I said of course but I would rather talk in Moygashel Orange Hall where I could talk to ordinary unionist, Protestant working people, and that is key to getting a conversation going with the working-class community. We are all part of that and, to some extent, people may have different visions of how to do that.

How do we get that vision? How do we bring the citizens' assembly into the working-class Protestant community, unionist community or whatever term we want to use? How do we get the grassroots unionist response? I found at council meetings at different times that unionist, the DUP and others would agree with a lot of the messages that we brought, but because we delivered the message, they would not vote with it. However, it is very important, if we are representing ordinary working-class people, that we give them an opportunity to be heard. We did not have much say in partition and partition happened very quickly after all without much discussion or input into it so let us have a better say in this matter. I believe the assembly must form another version of a more informal discussion other than its regimented parliamentary structure. It is an assembly after all and it is a good mechanism for a transition within an all-Ireland structure. It does not have to be done away with. It can be part of the all-Ireland structures for managing the changes that might actually happen within it.

How do we get the voice of the grassroots unionist community, not the politicians but the working-class people, into the civic forum and citizens' assembly and get discussions going? I do not think it has to be one discussion; it can be several and very informal. I thank the witnesses for coming along and it is good to hear everyone.