Mr. Cohen Taylor:

With regard to engagement, the youth assembly, other structures like that and statutory consultation responsibilities for engagement with young people, those different mechanisms have a role but the most important part of our ask is the meaningful part, not that those mechanisms are not meaningful. Embedding youth work within those engagement mechanisms makes them a lot more meaningful because it cannot just be about providing a space for young people who could respond to a consultation or who could sit in the youth assembly or the youth parliament. It has to be about building the capacity of young people from a range of different backgrounds and communities through youth work processes to engage. A good example of that is the model for the North South Youth Forum and the work of the Shared Island Youth Forum, which created a consortium approach to youth work.

The youth parliament also has youth workers involved in that process. I believe embedding youth work methodology, in respect of engagement mechanisms across the board, is very important. Also, with regard to the question about North-South relations, that feeds into it because whether you are talking about North-South relations, community relations inside Northern Ireland or east-west work, it is always the same. In order to have quality outcomes from those consultations and from that work, young people need to be allowed space to develop their knowledge and opinions about Northern Ireland, about the Republic and about the UK because a lot of the time, depending on where young people are from, that will be their lived experience and their perspective. In order for them to come to a space like this that they are not familiar with, they need to have that capacity building. That knowledge needs to be built first to empower them to do that effectively.