Ms Róisín McGlone:

I will take that question because, while I live in Belfast, I frequent those areas. There is a whole complexity of reasons why sectarianism has reared its head. We can be very disparaging of ourselves. We are really nice to outsiders; we just do not like each other from growing up in the North and in Belfast. There is a certain amount of truth in that. I know this is going to sound very counter intuitive but the reason any sectarianism is not necessarily a bad thing. I know that is counter-intuitive.

People were saying it behind closed doors and now maybe they were saying it out in the open. I would much prefer to facilitate a session where people are putting those things, and how they think, out on the table. Until that is gotten rid of and until it has gotten out, there is a lot of resistance and a lot of difficulty. If we take that as a microcosm of a society, then maybe we needed to have the conversations. We went through a number of cycles, the first of which not to talk about the war. There were so many different manifestations of that. It was everything from people not saying what they did, who they were with, or going into other areas. It was a case of, "Let us not talk about the war". Then we had a period where there was very much an upheaval in people talking about stuff, and then we have come around again. It comes back to the fact that we do not have a shared understanding of what caused the conflict. We do not have a shared understanding of what caused the war, so people are vying for position with regard to who caused it.

The members' response to my next point might be, "Oh well, you would say that anyway". The rise in social media has had an enormous impact. Where people had been talking behind closed doors and perhaps in community groups, now they are saying it with access to tens of thousands or millions of people. I do not have the answer to what the Senator has said but I would caution by saying that it is not necessarily a bad thing. People are braver now to say things that they really feel, whereas previously it might have eaten them up inside. A society that is eating itself up inside is not a good society. It manifests in lots of different ways. Psychologists say that the body holds the score. I believe this also in a bigger arena whereby society holds the score. We have been through a lot of pain and a lot of trauma. As a society we live with that pain and trauma. Some of the ways of getting through that is to talk about it. It does not answer the Senator's question.