Ms Tara Farrell:

I am the chief executive of Longford Women's Link, which is a social enterprise. We provide services to approximately 1,200 women and children annually in a wide range of areas. We also engage in widespread regional and national advocacy. I am a member of the board of Irish Rural Link and the chair of AONTAS, the national adult learning organisation. We have been engaged in cross-Border all-island work primarily through the Centre for Cross Border Studies but we also have other projects in recent years. We believe that working at a grassroots level is absolutely critical if we are to see meaningful co-operation and community development alongside an empowered civic society on these islands. Initiatives we have been involved in include the Ad-Hoc Group for North-South and East-West Cooperation since last year and previously the New Common Charter initiative which is driven by the Centre for Cross Border Studies. That is an initiative to empower civic society across these islands, North-South and east-west. We have individual projects, including one on pushing boundaries with women's tech in Belfast which examines the role of women in non-traditional spaces. We have a pilot project with the Northern Ireland Rural Women's Network supported through the reconciliation fund called From Grassroots to Government which is about advocacy and women finding their voices. AONTAS, of which I am chair, has a new initiative called the Network for Adult Learning Across Borders, NALAB, which is an umbrella partnership of leading organisations in the field of adult and community education. That gives a flavour of the kind of work we have been involved in.

As Dr. Soares says, what we really need is the committee's support around the implementation of the protocol in Article 11 and for us, amidst all the work we are doing, it is critical that there are proper functioning mechanisms and structures for engagement that include organisations from the South like ourselves as well as the North. Otherwise we are not going to see meaningful engagement or the true spirit of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement replicated. The questions we ask of our elected representatives is why those structures are not either functioning or in place. We also have to look at the long-term outcomes and impacts on communities. Looking at the last 18 months, civil society organisations have been to the fore of the Covid crisis. Most of our services were designated as essential. The question we ask is if we are deemed as essential during the Covid crisis and were relied upon to ensure that supports were delivered to communities, surely we are also essential in this context.

We are engaging in this work with our counterparts in the North because we believe in it. We believe in the value of the work and we believe in the need to uphold the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement in its totality. Obviously there are funding supports in place, such as the reconciliation fund, and they are very welcome but it is not just about the financial resources, it is about the impact that our work has and the energy that is required to maintain it without the proper structures that we can then feed into when we are looking at the impact of what it is we are doing. Obviously, dialogue is very important, that is what we are engaged in, but what is the longer term impact of our work? We cannot maintain this on our own. We need the structures. I am concerned that many civil society organisations will not be in a position to continue working in isolation on their own initiative. I hope that the committee might also share some of these concerns.