Erin McGreehan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests from the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation for being here; it is always great to have them with us. We are all incredibly ambitious for Ireland. I am especially so and I have such belief in it. We can only operate in what we have at the minute. Organisations like the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation are facilitators and mediators and this is their trained profession.

As Senator Blaney was saying, the role we all have is to plan. It is the responsibility and duty of policymakers to plan and make policies for the future. It is for us to hopefully facilitate and support the likes of the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in creating that ground-up community communication and building trust. We all know that our engagement is on a knife-edge and that there is fear and distrust, which is getting worse. With the expertise the witnesses have, with the relationships they have gathered and with the understanding they have all gained, what is the angle they can take to support legislators in a hands-off way? It is for us to do the policy but it is for the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation to support us and help ensure those good relations are on good foundations that remain there and are kept strong. No matter what, as Ms McNamee said, politics might change but geography does not. No matter what happens on the island of Ireland we are one island and we are all here together. What are the objectives, in this tricky time and as we reach out to all communities, that there are no gombeen men on either side and that we are all on the one side?

I was speaking to somebody the other night and we said that nobody won the war but that in reality our children have won. When I speak to my four kids, they do not have a clue what it was like to live near the Border when you had soldiers jumping out from the ditch, when you had people taking you out of the car because you had a southern registration and all of these things. That was the battle we won so how do we move on to the next stage? Whatever that stage is, it is now and we are have relationships so how do we continue that and give the likes of Glencree the best support we can? I hope those are not jumbled questions.