Mr. Cohen Taylor:

Good morning committee members. I will begin by thanking the committee for allowing us to speak today. My name is Cohen Taylor, my pronouns are he-him and I have the privilege of serving as the chairperson of the Northern Ireland Youth Forum.

The Belfast-Good Friday Agreement has provided us with relative peace, hope and the opportunity for a better future. Its potential, however, is yet to be fully realised. Political instability and uncertainty has caused a backlog of decision-making which, alongside financial instability, has resulted in many young people feeling alienated from politics in Northern Ireland. I was one of the 8% of young people able to attend an integrated school, which in a largely segregated system, allows for children of different abilities, genders and religions to be taught together in the same classroom. The agreement pledges to encourage integrated education and shared housing, but more needs to be done to meet the growing demand of the 77% of parents who, according to a recent poll, want their children to be educated together with the hope that those children will then have the chance to get the bus home together to a shared, safe and prosperous community and furthermore, to a community where the 15,000 households who presented as homeless last year will have a secure roof over their heads and the support they need. Transgenerational trauma feeds into the worrying statistic that more people have committed suicide since the end of the Troubles than those who died as a result of the conflict throughout the Troubles. Record numbers of young people are on waiting lists to see mental health professionals, while services struggle to meet growing demand. The agreement has given us much but young people need more action and delivery to make Northern Ireland a better place for us all to grow up and live in.

As members will see from the briefing paper, we are making an overall request of the committee today. We ask that it write to the relevant Departments, encouraging them to fund the establishment of a mechanism for long-term, meaningful engagement with young people in order that the potential of the agreement can be fully realised. We must ensure that young people are at the heart of decision-making and feel empowered by our politics. This must happen within Northern Ireland, but also North-South and east-west.

I thank the committee. We would welcome any questions members may have and we will certainly try our best to answer them.