Ms Paddy Kelly:

I would echo the importance of all-island dialogue in terms of addressing what the Children's Rights Alliance and the Children's Law Centre believe to be the potentially serious adverse impact of Brexit on the Good Friday Agreement. By way of background, the Children's Law Centre and the Children's Rights Alliance came together as far back as 2016 because at that stage, we recognised the potential impact of Brexit on children's rights and together we commissioned pro bonoevidence from A&L Goodbody and invited it to look at the impact of Brexit on children's rights. We disseminated that information quite widely, including to Members of the Dáil and representatives in London, Brussels and Belfast. I, along with Ms Saoirse Brady from the Children's Rights Alliance, gave evidence alongside Ms Michelle Gildernew in Westminster on this particular issue.

On the back of that, when we saw the withdrawal agreement and the protocol, we continued to believe there was a real threat to children's rights and to the Good Friday Agreement from what was unfolding. Indeed, we saw that in the context of the UK Government's threat to repeal the Human Rights Act and potentially to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR, which, as committee members know as well as I do, is a fundamental cornerstone of the Good Friday Agreement. We were concerned that would interfere with children's legal entitlements and result in soaring child poverty, and that it would interfere with child protection, anti-trafficking measures, the rights of EU citizens in the North and EU-derived rights of citizens generally in the North. At the same time, we were conscious that the winds of constitutional change are blowing across these islands. One only has to look at the independence movement in Scotland and the growing dialogue around constitutional change on the island of Ireland. We are also conscious of the Irish Government's shared island dialogue process. The Children's Rights Alliance and ourselves feel strongly that children's rights principles and the voices of children and young people should underpin all of the considerations of governments on these islands and developments that are happening. The new political realities, whatever the future constitutional changes on these islands may be, must be informed by the voices of children and young people. That is why we came together.

The project we are doing has three strands. We are commissioning research from eminent academics in the University of Liverpool, who are going to scope out the impact of Brexit and the protocol on children's rights and the capacity to vindicate those rights. That includes socioeconomic rights. We are deeply concerned about the impact on child poverty that Brexit and the withdrawal agreement will have.

We have an exciting piece of research and pilot programme. We are going to listen to the voices of children and young people and hear their concerns over the impact of Brexit, the protocol and the constitutional conversations happening on this island. We are making efforts to reach those communities of children and young people who are hard to reach, including the Protestant, unionist and loyalist, PUL, community in the North.

We also want to bring together those of us who work in the children and young people sector to have a dialogue about how we can work together to build relationships on this island and to act as a strong lobby and as a resource base for people like the committee members to ensure the decisions they make about the withdrawal agreement, the protocol and the constitutional conversations are made with full knowledge of the implications for children's rights, and having listened to the voices of children and young people.