Ms Michelle Gildernew:

I welcome all the witnesses to today's meeting. It is good to see them all. It has been a useful discussion.

The forthcoming 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement will be a fundamental moment in Irish history. While I do not want to juxtapose it with the position on Brexit, that has changed opinions among many people in the North. One of the last points made was around civic versus political unionism. There is a move within civic unionism to engage in the debate and prepare. I am also a little fearful that, because it is at the whim of the British Secretary of State to Northern Ireland to call a referendum, we do not want to be unprepared.

One of the areas that was vital 25 years ago was the fact that a copy of the Good Friday Agreement was posted to every home. People could pick it up and read it. I know these days that links are online and so forth, but the fact that every home had a hard copy and anyone could pick it up and read it was a valuable exercise. Perhaps we should repeat that 25 years on because we now have a whole cohort of young voters who were not born during the Good Friday Agreement era and whose future is predicated on some of the rights included in the Good Friday Agreement. There are also people who have come from other parts of the world and made Ireland their home who I presume would be interested in the rights based in the Good Friday Agreement and would be keen to read that document, perhaps for the first time for many of them, and to see what their future could look like in a unified Ireland. Rights and protections for minorities is part of that. That is just a thought.

In the Canadian roadshow this year, along with some of my colleagues-----