Ms Niamh Mallaghan:

I thank the committee for having me here to speak about my experience as a young person in the North of Ireland. I am elected honorary secretary of the Northern Ireland Youth Forum. I am here to speak about youth advocacy. That means young people like me sitting in rooms with decision-makers and having a say on the issues that affect us. Obviously, this meeting is a fantastic example of something like that and the first one I have been lucky enough to come to in the South of Ireland. This currently happens in a very limited capacity through work like the Northern Ireland Youth Forum. I have been in rooms in Stormont many times. I have been to Westminster and met with councillors, but that is not the norm. I am extremely lucky to be involved in this organisation and have those opportunities. Young people are consistently telling us they are not being heard when it comes to pretty massive issues, including mental health, the Covid-19 pandemic - we did a massive piece of research on that where young people were saying they do not care about us at all - voting rights, which were already spoken about today, and peacebuilding. For the future of Ireland, I hope young people are brought into these conversations as valued members and not just for the sake of trying to appease the youth but to enact meaningful change.

Why would you ever try to decide something on behalf of another person without talking to that person first? I am not going to make my mate dinner without asking them what they fancy. It makes no sense to leave young people out of this conversation. This issue is particularly bad in the North where our government parties seem to decide every five minutes that they do not want to work with each other. When we ask decision makers to enforce change or even to have a conversation with us, the excuse in recent years has often been that the government is not actually sitting so nothing can be done at the moment or that it has just started back up and so has more important things to do. If we are lucky enough to have a functioning Executive, we have to fight against the green versus orange issue to get any change whatsoever. For young people in the North, this is not only incredibly frustrating, but is keeping our society from progressing to any acceptable degree. Personally, I am coming to the end of my university degree and my family is constantly telling me that I should leave the North because nothing is ever going to get resolved and I am just going to get stuck in the past. That is awful. It is my home but my family is telling me I will be better off somewhere else.

We have sat in rooms with politicians and realised very quickly that they had us there for a meeting simply for the photo opportunity or good PR. They think that, because we are young people, we do not have anything important to say. Perhaps they just do not care that much. Sitting here today, I have heard all the young people make fantastic speeches and points. We have important things to say. Especially when you are under 18 and cannot vote yet, politicians do not feel they need to appease you through having conversations with you. It is incredible the change we can make whenever we are actually taken seriously. We are valuable and contributing members of society and we can fight to have our voices heard. I have seen young person after young person come though programmes like the Northern Ireland Youth Forum and fight for change in their communities and their country. Whether decision makers listen or not, they will continue to fight and to make change. It would just be a whole lot easier if the decision makers helped out in the first place.