Mr. Stuart Hughes:

I thank the Chair and the committee for the invitation. It is always great to hear some southern voices. Anyone who has been in Belfast recently will know that is not a particularly new phenomenon.

I am not as well known as some of the other councillors in this group, so I will give the committee some of my background. As the Chair said, I am an Ulster Unionist councillor, elected in May 2019 to Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council, representing Lisburn North. It is a relatively diverse area. I am proud that I am the only councillor in the area who still lives in the area. We have strong working-class unionist areas and more demographically changing class areas. When one is approaching the age of 30, being referred to as the "next generation" is refreshing. I am sure some of my colleagues will agree with this.

The Ulster Unionist Party is proud of its role in the Good Friday Agreement. We have never shied away from saying that, and we never will. We are proud of the three-stranded approach that came out of it. There will be some people who think that my attendance at a meeting such as this one is somehow a dilution of my own unionism. To them, I can only say that nothing was ever lost by engagement. My unionism will not be diluted by anything that is said or heard today. My unionism is mine. How I choose to shape it is my decision.

To give the committee some background on what shapes my views, my parents come from different backgrounds. My father is from a working-class unionist background in Belfast and my mother is from, as I like to remind her frequently, leafy suburbia in east Belfast. They were quite the mix. They worked hard to bring us up. We lived in a comfortable, mixed middle-class area. I feel fortunate that this is my background. Unfortunately, the reality is that too many people in Northern Ireland still today live in segregated communities. That is not just segregation through housing, but through education. My objective is that Northern Ireland remains within the United Kingdom, but that this happens as a union of people.

We can only do that when we start to share and live together and educate our children together. Those are some of the priorities I see for the future.

We will delve into several topical issues during questioning. One point I will emphasise now is that in the past several years we have heard people say how we must dial down the rhetoric. We may hear the point made during this meeting as well. Those are usually the people who are then the first to dial up the rhetoric after they have made that statement. What is required are calm heads and cool conversations. People need to be confident in their own identity, whether that is British, Irish, Northern Irish or whatever else, as is allowed for by the Good Friday Agreement. This is the key aspect for the future. We must allow people to be confident in their identities and we must not be insecure in ours. Those are some of my initial thoughts and I will be happy to take any questions. I thank the committee very much for the invitation to contribute.