Ms Michelle Gildernew:

The witnesses are very welcome. Fáilte roimh. As it is the first meeting of the year, I wish everybody a happy new year. I thank Senator Currie for her very kind words, which I will pass on to Niall if he is not watching.

First of all, I love Zoom. I was listening to the meeting the whole way down the road. I was at a picket line in Dungannon before I left this morning, so I also want to extend solidarity to all the public sector workers and everybody on picket lines today, including the staff of Waterways Ireland, because of the situation we are in. It really is an untenable, disgraceful situation in terms of the comments Chris Heaton-Harris and others have made around withholding that money from public sector workers. Things are generally not good in the North as the witnesses, who are all very welcome to this meeting, know.

Deputies Conway-Walsh and Tully have covered quite a bit of what we wanted to say, but I have a question for Ms McIntyre. I understand the need to have some single-identity work to build capacity. However, at what point does that single-identity funding stop? At what point do they have to seek partners and have to work? In my constituency there are groups that have got funding over the years and sometimes the polarisation is worse than it was 25 years ago. We have had 25 years of peace, yet in some areas that polarisation just gets deeper by the year. I am aware of one group that has received public funding, a single-identity group, and a young man who is in the band landed to band practice with his GAA bag and was told not to bring any GAA stuff in there and that he had to choose. He said the GAA was not asking him to choose, so he went with it. He left the band, which was not a nationalist-identity band. That was victimisation of a young fellow who was trying to enjoy both sport and music and ended up being ostracised from one community because of his passion for GAA. How do we tackle that? How do we ensure that is a focus for the next period? As I said, that polarisation is worse now in some areas than it was when I was first elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone and it is deeply worrying.