Ms Naoimh McNamee:

I thank the committee for having us here today.

It is a privilege to speak with members. I want to give a bit of context for the work that we do in Glencree. We are delighted and, as I said, it is a great privilege to be invited here to address the committee and to take the opportunity to discuss the work being undertaken by the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. I am joined by my colleague, Ms Róisín McGlone, from Belfast who is the programme manager for our PEACE IV-funded programme addressing the legacy of violence through facilitated dialogue. This opening statement introduces Glencree’s work, particularly with victims and survivors in Northern Ireland and across this island.

To give a bit of context for those who are not too familiar with Glencree, we were established in 1974 in response to the conflict in Northern Ireland. The Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation works to prevent and transform political and intercommunal conflict and build peaceful and inclusive societies. As the only dedicated peace centre in the Republic of Ireland, we bring individuals and groups impacted by conflict together and help them to find pathways to reconciliation and sustained peace through facilitated dialogue, relationship-building, public discourse and shared learning.

We transform conflict by focusing on six key programme areas. Our community and political dialogue programme works with political parties and their representatives drawn from across the islands of Ireland and Britain, as well as civic society organisations and actors integral to the political debate. We do this by creating and sustaining a process where people of different traditions, political persuasions or cultural identities can come together in confidential spaces to discuss the issues that arise as disrupting factors in their relationships with each other.

Our PEACE IV-funded programme focuses on addressing the legacy of violence through facilitated dialogue by working with victims' and survivors' groups, representatives and individuals with differing interpretations of what happened in Northern Ireland’s past. We achieve this through different mechanisms of engagement and sustained contact between victims and survivors and those perceived to have inflicted harm upon them.

Our intercultural and refugee programme aims to make Ireland a more welcoming and inclusive place, with respect for all ethnic, faith and cultural backgrounds, by facilitating intercultural dialogues among refugees, migrants and members of ethnic and faith minority communities.

Our women's leadership programme is closely aligned with UN Resolution 1325 and aims to support and empower women on the island of Ireland who have experience of political conflict and its effects to expand their influence and become active leaders in the political processes that promote peacebuilding on the island of Ireland and internationally.

The peace education and young adult work that we undertake aims to promote engagement among students and young adults from across the island of Ireland through peace education, shared learning and cross-Border, cross-community relationship building. One of the programmes included in that is our partnership with Politics in Action in Northern Ireland, which works with young schoolchildren in the North and South and engages with politicians North and South. These programmes support young people in exploring their own and each others' identities and history, while at the same time allowing space for thought and action to build a shared future. The development of this work is a key priority for Glencree under our new Strategic Plan 2022-2026, as we seek to establish a centre of excellence for practical peacebuilding in Glencree, which will be focussed on training and supporting the next generation of peacebuilders on this island. This is a particular area that we are very focused on in Glencree.

The southern voice for peace programme promotes an all-island, civil society approach to lasting peace in Northern Ireland. This programme features a number of public events each year which seek to engage people from the Republic of Ireland with the issues, organisations and communities in Northern Ireland in order to make a contribution to deepening reconciliation throughout the whole island.

Internationally, Glencree has supported peace efforts in more than ten countries including Haiti, Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Palestine-Israel and, most recently, Cameroon. As well as sharing learnings from the Northern Irish peace process, this work also presents a very useful opportunity for Glencree to learn from the experiences of conflict transformation in other jurisdictions.

Today our focus will remain on our own shores and the work we are undertaking to address the legacy of conflict in Northern Ireland. I will talk a little bit about Ms McGlone's programme in particular. The PEACE IV-funded programme is on addressing the legacy of conflict through facilitated dialogue. Well over two decades since the signing of the Good Friday-Belfast Agreement, Northern Ireland and the Border counties remain divided along communal lines. A contributing factor to this divide is the inadequacy of the Good Friday Agreement and subsequent political efforts to address the legacy of past violence. The deficit is most acutely felt in the divisive relationship between victims' and survivors' groups and the individuals, groups and institutions perceived to have inflicted harm upon them in the past. In 2017, Glencree was awarded four years of PEACE IV funding under the building positive relations strand to target these issues through our addressing the legacy of violence through facilitated dialogue programme. The programme is due to finish at the end of August 2022 after being granted an eight-month extension due to the limitations on our work inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

This programme primarily focuses on the experiences of victims and survivors groups and their communities in Northern Ireland. Through a process-based approach that creates the space for private and confidential facilitated dialogues and the promotion of sustained contact across divides, themes and issues that remain as obstacles to deeper understanding and the promotion of positive relations are examined. A crucial aspect of this programme has been that the groups, along with other relevant parties, co-develop their own process and pace of engagement prior to entering into dialogue with groups and individuals with differing interpretations of what happened in the past. The primary objectives of this programme have been: increased empathy, understanding, and acknowledgment of other stories and lived experiences; transformed social and political attitudes; decreased sectarianism; increased profile of women and women’s stories within the legacy context; and increased confidence within victims' and survivors' groups that are perceived as being hard to reach.

The learning we have accrued through this project has been and will continue to be shared on national and international platforms via journal publications, webinars, reports, roundtables and symposia, with victims' and survivors' groups, other interest groups, academics, policy-makers and practitioners, to assist in ascertaining how to productively engage with Northern Ireland’s contentious past.

On reflecting on the lifetime of the project to date, while progress has been made in some areas, what is evident is that the political processes in place to address the issues faced by victims and survivors remain inadequate in both jurisdictions. The social and political context in which the

programme has operated has been extremely challenging. As the committee will appreciate, legacy issues are very contested and the work has had to navigate major upheaval during the programme life cycle, including a sustained collapse of the Stormont Assembly, Brexit, ongoing disagreements

over the Northern Ireland Protocol, failure to implement the Stormont House Agreement, recent legacy proposals from the UK Government and, indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic. In this context, it has been vital that our programme has the flexibility to be responsive to social and political change. Victims' and survivors' groups and other programme participants can re-evaluate their strategic priorities, alter or reprioritise specific goals and seek to delay or accelerate particular facets of dialogue processes in response to changing contexts. This can present significant challenges for the type of

work the legacy of violence programme is undertaking.

Despite the PEACE IV funding drawing to a close in August, Glencree remains committed to work with victims and survivors in Northern Ireland. It is a commitment that has been embedded in Glencree’s new five-year Strategic Plan 2022-2026, which will be formally launched in the coming weeks at Dublin Castle.

We welcome questions from the committee and thank members again for the opportunity to discuss our work.