Ms Michelle Gildernew:

It is good to see Lord Empey again and I will follow on from that point. Lord Empey said a lot of unionists were not for the Good Friday Agreement and I would say that a lot of republicans were not dying about it either. I remember being at a meeting in Toomebridge where Mitchel McLaughlin told us to read the Good Friday Agreement and then read it again. There was a concerted effort by the Sinn Féin leadership to sell the agreement. We all knew how hard it had been to get it together and to fruition and how it was so important to make it work. Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and the entire Sinn Féin leadership went on the road and we did meetings with hundreds of people, including at kitchen tables. We brought the African National Congress over to help talk to people who were having difficulties and we took the Good Friday Agreement and embraced it. We recognised it was not by any means a republican document but that there was enough in there for everybody to make it work. There was positive leadership in republicanism at that time to bring people along.

Lord Empey talked about a political vacuum and how people will operate within one. I was on the Executive between 2007 and 2011 and Michael McGimpsey was on it, along with me, as Minister of Health, Social Services and Public Safety. He and I had a good working relationship, especially in the North-South Ministerial Council meetings where I was the accompanying Minister. During that period there was no vacuum but there was still this loyalist paramilitary control in their communities. Bronagh Hinds was before this committee last week and she was scathing about the fact that, 25 years later, there is still this control in loyalist communities. Women are trying hard to keep their families together and to keep their children and grandchildren off drugs. They are trying to work through poverty, inequality and all the issues that exist within loyalist communities, yet the loyalist paramilitaries still have those communities by the throat. Does Lord Empey see that there has maybe been a lack of positive leadership within unionism and loyalism to bring people along and show them that life post the Good Friday Agreement is better than it was beforehand and that the peace is something we all hold precious and dear and that we all need to work towards? It is a wee bit like marriage where all parties within the marriage need to work at it to keep it going. I have been on the Executive and I have been working with other unionist politicians who are not putting the effort into that relationship and who are not really trying to bring everybody with them. I am interested in Lord Empey's perspective 25 years later. If there had been a different perspective and point of view back in 1998, would we be where we are today? Would those communities, particularly loyalist working-class women, be dealing with the stuff they currently have to deal with?