Ms Sorcha Eastwood:

I thank the committee for the invitation to participate in the meeting. One of the most profound and truly pivotal moments in our shared history was the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. As a young person who had an interest in politics, I watched the countless figures, mostly men, emerge from Castle Buildings in the years preceding the agreement. Indeed, I often saw them in the streets of my home town, Lisburn. I often looked at them and wondered if they held the same values that I held and if they wanted to fight for my rights to have my voice heard.

Twenty-three years after the Good Friday Agreement, one could be forgiven for thinking that our politics has fallen back to pre-1998 standards, with political parties still selling the politics of a new Ireland or an ever-stronger union. With both these goals legitimate but eternally incompatible, it can sometimes feel that we are mired in political stalemate, with Brexit causing political instability. However, the political sands are shifting beneath our feet, with parties that do not designate as unionist or nationalist seeing significant growth and electoral success. It has sent shock waves throughout the political system. It has challenged the old assumptions. Indeed, our election results in Lagan Valley in the 2019 general election are still sending shock waves throughout our politics today. Radical politics is not about the age-old unity or union binary. It is about tackling the barriers that divide us, throwing them aside and working together, tearing down the walls of division, brick by brick, identifying as a united community instead of separate or divided communities and stepping forward together as one community to tackle the toxic legacy of years of conflict, paramilitarism, sectarianism and segregation.

People are embracing the politics of united community and we need that to be reflected in the mechanisms of the Agreement. The Good Friday Agreement was an opportunity to transform our politics. It provided the foundation to build a better place for us all; a place where everyone was respected, valued and welcomed; historic wrongs would be righted; those who lost their lives would be remembered with reverence; and those hurt, injured and maimed by the conflict would be looked after, not left to fend for themselves or fight their own lonely battles. Yet, we have not delivered on this. We laid the foundations of peace, but the peace we have built is a long way from the blueprint drawn up in 1998. We have peace, but sometimes on a piecemeal basis: justice, for those who are able to get it, served on an individual, not a collective, basis; communities that are still in the throes of ongoing paramilitary coercive control, having to negotiate their small peace with malevolent forces; lives half-lived with young people who have not seen the peace dividend; with the number of people who have died by suicide much greater than the number of the bereaved lost through the conflict since 1998; and still fighting for truth and justice.

Since the inception of Northern Ireland, it has been taken as read that our politics must be divided in terms of identity, a pattern that has emerged and has stayed with us. However, in recent years, this has changed, with a growth and significant rise in unaligned parties, including my own, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. Indeed, this has given rise to the question: what happens if Alliance Party of Northern Ireland is the second-biggest party? As somebody who is neither nationalist nor unionist, my vote should count the same as anyone else's, and it is deeply wrong that in certain circumstances, my vote would not count, if that were the case. We are making great progress with our integrated education Bill. Many people and families now have fluid and multifaceted identities. Indeed, we have welcomed many newcomer families to Lisburn from Syria. The Northern Ireland in 1998 and the Northern Ireland now, thankfully, are hugely different and changed places. Every day we are thankful that we do not have to live through what our parents and others lived through. We have a different, diverse, and vibrant community that has changed in many ways since 1998. The future we are building is not a binary choice; it is a rainbow of colour, identity and values that respects everyone's place and is working together for a united community and a peace.