Dr. Claire Mitchell:

Dr. Farry is right about our surnames and the tangled web of our family histories. When I recently did some genealogical research, the biggest unionist supporter in our family had Irish-language speaking relatives from the Shankill Road and many Catholic relatives as well. I refer to that sense of mixed relationships, which was more difficult in the days of Ne Temere. We are not living in that world any more.

Whenever we chose to send our kids to primary school, from a Protestant background, we sent them to a Catholic primary school because there were no integrated options nearby. We thought we would integrate ourselves and be great peacemakers. I was embarrassed I ever thought that because what we found when we arrived was that we already lived in a place where people had mixed, weaved and tangled around one another. The school was incredibly mixed, not just in terms of Catholics and Protestants but in terms of mixed marriages and newcomer kids from all types of countries. My kids are living in an entirely different world than myself. Generation X and the end of millennials had conflict embedded in their childhood and then an adult life lived in peace. My children do not recognise the kinds of things and concepts I talk about and the world I still half-live in.

This is becoming the mainstream and with each generational change, this is just the way the North is. I regularly feel constrained and frustrated with everything being reduced to the camps Dr. Farry referred to and the assumption all of these things come in packages of identity, namely, Catholic, nationalist, republican, Irish; and Protestant unionist, loyalist, British. The solution I have taken for myself is to pick one from each column, so I will be a Protestant and a republican and I will see what happens to combine those words.

This is not a change that is going to make a difference on an individual level and I agree with the Alliance Party's proposals for reform of the Assembly institutions. It is not sustainable, 26 years after the peace agreement, to work in terms of assumed ethnic blocs when even the people in those blocs are straining to fit the criteria. I have expressed my own desire for reunification but I do not for a moment think that comes without significant reform of the Northern Ireland institutions first. I am very aware that unionism is becoming a minority and there are still needs for minority protections and various parties have interests in keeping those in place but surely we must be able to find a way to loosen the vice grip of those categories because society has moved on. People have moved on and those institutional set-ups are holding us back.