Ms ?mer Deane:

To start at the research aspect, we are always interested in ideas for research where people spot gaps. In fact, we have undertaken 30 pieces of research so far, several of them in conjunction with the ESRI. This year, we are hoping to reflect on what we have done to see what the themes are, what issues are arising and what the headlines are in this regard.

Turning to the dialogues, as I mentioned earlier, especially in the context of the shared island youth forum, the structure there will be to ask the participants to come up with their statement, vision and values around five themes. This material will then be brought to the Government in the autumn. We hope that will help us to see where dialogues might go at the next stage. All the dialogues are online and available for people to review at any point.

The dialogues themselves often inform where research should be conducted. The civic fund also came about through the dialogues. It was recognised that while we can organise occasional dialogues, an awful lot more needs going on out there and this was why the civic fund was established. It is intended to give funding to the National Women's Council of Ireland to set up the North-South Women's Dialogue. The Wheel and NICVA are undertaking their own iCommunity project. The idea is to try to use the dialogue to spawn other dialogues in other places totally independent of the work of the shared island unit. We do, however, always review and examine them in terms of our own prioritisation to try to work out where we will go next with this process. Sometimes, that involves going back to a theme we have used before, because there is more to be said about it or people have asked us to explore a different angle.