Ms Susan McCrory:

I wish to take this opportunity to thank the joint committee for our invitation today. It is a great pleasure for me to be here.

I am currently the managing director of Falls Women’s Centre. I will first give a bit of background. Falls Women's Centre is based in the middle of the Falls Road in the heart of west Belfast. We were established by local women in 1982 at the height of the conflict. Today, our centre employs 24 staff. We provide childcare, education and training and advice. Our advice and advocacy supports women and survivors of domestic violence, rape and abuse right down to supporting them through the cost-of-living crisis we have today with food banks, fuel vouchers and welfare benefits. Our training and education is up to a standard of level 5, which is university level. At the moment, with funding we have for that, we are able to provide free education to women on benefits in the hope of moving them into education.

In terms of the constitutional conversation, Falls Women's Centre and Shankill Women's Centre have always worked at cross-community level. The 14 women's centres right across the North work with each other at cross-community level, but we never referred to it as cross-community good relations. We referred to it as women coming together to share and support each other and create a better future, particularly because we all work in disadvantaged areas. However, we have changed our language as we have gone on and matched our language with Government level and policy level.

Much change came to the community sector with the Good Friday Agreement. A lot of change came with the European funding and the support that came into the community. We saw ourselves getting more structured in employment and becoming employers. We became more grounded in our community in terms of community development and moving on.

In 2016, Brexit came and changed a lot of conversations. People in the North did not necessarily vote to leave the European Union, but we had to. As part of the UK democracy, we were forced to leave with Brexit. Therefore, Brexit changed the conversation. Do we want to go with the UK or do we want to see how we can become something different and get back into the European Union? That is still very prevalent today. The people in the North still wish to go back into the European Union.

However, with that came the constitutional conversation. Around 2019, Ms Weir and I came together with Ulster University to design a template that would allow the constitutional conversation. For us, it involved sitting around a table with academics asking us about the best language to use and what would be offensive and not offensive to people and how we would begin using language that would allow the conversation to begin to look at a shared island. With that, we have worked since 2019 on bringing women together and creating opportunities for education, particularly around community development, leadership and social issues. We then brought in issues around what a shared island would look like. If we had a shared island tomorrow, what would women want? The biggest thing we have found is that women at a grassroots level need to be involved. If we look at the situation and how things work, we are in the middle of an election and everyone is selling their manifesto. However, people on the doorstep do not necessarily know and understand a full manifesto.

For us as women, we want to bring it down to basic bread-and-butter issues. What would having a shared island look like for us? What would it entail in terms of education, health, the economy, our children’s future and dealing with the past? How would it understand our different faith bases, our different affiliations to organisations and our own cultures? Even those have changed because we have become a more multicultural society. Now, we say that we need to have more discussions with the new cultures that have come to our country. It is not just orange and green, Catholic and Protestant. There is a wider range to consider.

Our main focus is women. This is all about women. It is about gender equality and how, as women, we and our issues do not get lost in any future discussion. Our issues cannot be generalised and called “equality”. For women, childcare, education and confidence are major barriers. When we discuss gender equality, we are talking about drilling down into the specifics that will help women to move forward.

Ms Weir will discuss moving on from the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement has created the peace. We can never ignore the great work it has done because it has brought peace to the North of Ireland, but has it brought a future yet? It has had more pit stops along the way and more long breaks than we intended, and there is still much left to be implemented within the agreement to allow the shared island discussion to come into effect. For me, the Good Friday Agreement is still the bedrock of moving forward on anything that is about bringing peace to the North and the South.

We have been through the Covid-19 pandemic and are now in a cost-of-living crisis. While we have tried to consider the strategic level, our main concern as a community and grassroots organisation is working and serving women on the ground. For the past number of years, we have worked on helping people with food parcels, fuel poverty, women losing their houses because of mortgage increases and women trying to find employment. Women in part-time employment who are low-paid workers are sometimes worse off than people on benefits. Our main work has been focused on trying to support women within our community while hopefully moving towards a new future as the situation progresses.