Ms Eileen Weir:

I thank the committee for the invitation. I also work with Shankill Women’s Centre and co-ordinate a network in an area hit by the worst part of the Troubles. There were more people murdered and more devastation in north Belfast than in any other part of Belfast. I believe there are 26 interfaces inside a 2-mile or 3-mile radius. It is very patchwork, as there is no one constant community. You move from one community to another and another. The area I work in is like a patchwork quilt.

Due to peace building, good relations and the Good Friday Agreement, community workers, who are undervalued, still continue to carry out their work. We do not see as much violence in terms of murders and bombings, which is a blessing, but that is solely down to the people working at grassroots level trying to keep such violence at bay. We still have trouble at our interfaces nightly and daily, but it is more of a recreational violence now than what it used to be called, namely, sectarian violence. It is just one of those things that happens that we have learned to live with, but we should not have had to do so.

This brings me back to the Good Friday Agreement. Unfortunately, much of what women, in particular the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, fought to have included in the Good Friday Agreement to promote reconciliation among the general population has still not been implemented. There are still communities right across Northern Ireland that are being controlled and gatekept by so-called paramilitaries and where voices that speak out cannot be heard without the threat of intimidation.

My submission highlights three or four different elements. When I campaigned and voted for the Good Friday Agreement and 71.2% or 71.4% of people voted for it on the basis of what it contained, the civic forum was a great attraction for women in particular because it was a platform at a time when women could not get on platforms. They still find it difficult to get on platforms. The civic forum was suspended in 2002 and never restored. It was another avenue for us to be able to advise and consult our political representatives and tell them that the way they were doing things was perhaps not the right way. At least it was a method of consultation, but we do not have that now. As such, 71.4% of people are not getting what they voted for.

The next issue is a big one and everyone, including the Irish Government, is running away from it, namely, our bill of rights. You could say that our conflict started over 50 years ago with a rights agenda for all. Twenty-six years on from the Good Friday Agreement, we are still fighting to establish a bill of rights. In a survey by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission in 2021, which was not that long ago, 62% of respondents agreed on starting a process to achieve a bill of rights for Northern Ireland, 88% strongly agreed that it should contain something about our mental and physical health, 88% agreed on the right to education, 87% agreed on the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, 86% agreed on the right to food, 84% agreed on the right to adequate accommodation, 84% agreed on the right to an adequate standard of living and 83% agreed on the right to work. The calculation of these figures is not only based on communities, but on community workers, steering groups, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland and some other statutory bodies, but we are still sitting and waiting. Everyone is running away from even sitting down to have a conversation about having a process for us to establish a bill of rights. A bill of rights is crucial. We started off with the civil rights movement to try to gain rights, but we still do not have that 26 years on from the Good Friday Agreement.

Something that is abused within the Good Friday Agreement – it was put in as a safeguard – is the petition of concern whereby a political party can vote against something that does not suit it even where the majority in Stormont would like to see it pass. One party has the power to stop legislation.

We were out for two years, in for two years and out for five years, and any legislation that was actually achieved in that time was lobbied for by women who went to Westminster and lobbied there while Stormont was down and trying to decide what it was going to do. We were able to get the gay marriage legislation through. We were able to get the abortion Act amended and put through, not to mention a number of other things for which we campaigned at grassroots level. We took them to Westminster while we did not have Stormont, because we were able to do that. It is very concerning when a majority of people vote to have something changed and then one political party abuses the petition of concern.

The other thing that was put in, and it was a last-minute thing but they were able to get it in, was integrated education. When the Good Friday Agreement was signed 26 years ago, the level of integrated education at that time was 7%. I think we are at 7.2% 26 years on. Integrated education goes hand-in-hand with shared housing. Unless we have shared housing, we will have an integrated education system that is sending children home to their own communities. They are not mixing outside school; they are mixing inside school. When they come out of school they are going back into their communities of single identity. We need to seriously look at shared housing, so when our children go to integrated education or any type of education and when they come home, they are meeting people from different cultural backgrounds and different religions in their own community. I am not talking orange and green but something that is very much representative of our civic society, which is more than the orange and green. We have big populations in our community, and they have been there for as long as I can remember. They are our Indian community, our Chinese community and most recently our Polish community and people from the Philippines. The nurses and a lot of our social and healthcare workers are people who came here to settle and work many years ago. Within the women's movement, we do not talk about orange and green. We talk about women, and women who represent our civic society.

We have been up and down with strand 2. It has not been stable. Every time we start to plan, budget and keep down the turmoil, poverty remains the biggest issue here. We have people who are still living in disadvantaged areas - those most disadvantaged and affected by our conflict - and are living in poverty. Mental health is especially something. We keep getting yearly budgets and we have to go with a begging bowl to actually get those budgets.

With regard to the women's movement, Falls Women's Centre is 40 years old and Shankill Women's Centre is 38 years old. Long before the Good Friday Agreement, we were actually doing the hard work at grassroots level. Women were actually running their communities because most of the men were in prison. Women were the breadwinners and the ones who got their kids educated. They were the ones who clothed their children, and now they are the ones who are being penalised.

I will speak for my own organisation and project, which is the Greater North Belfast Women's Network. I have 18 groups with women in them associated with that network. I will set out how many people we would probably see within all of the groups in the shared north Belfast community fund in any given year. Some 11,878 people have come through our doors in a single year. If you multiply that by 30 or 40 years, you can understand the impact that community is having on our communities and our peace process.

We need a lot more in reconciliation. We may have peace but we do not have reconciliation and the two must go hand-in-hand when we are talking about a lasting peace. I actually want to see a lasting peace, whatever comes out of the Good Friday Agreement, when we get everything that we voted for and the constitutional questions in that. We need to get it out and inform the grassroots people. We keep getting papers from universities and different departments. You would really need somebody to translate them for me to even understand them. We have asked about the document on numerous occasions. The last one was the Windsor Framework. They sent those documents to us to read, analyse and take out to the grassroots women to inform them because a lot of mistruths were being told. In politics, that happens. We actually had to demand an easy-read version. We should not, as women who are 51% of the population in Northern Ireland, have to demand to get an easy-read version for us to understand what is actually happening with our country.

Inequality is still a big issue. Resolution 1325 is not recognised in Northern Ireland, which means we do not have a right to be at the table when it comes to peace talks. We have to try to get in through the back door or just gatecrash and do what the community sector does: apologise and say sorry rather than asking for permission. That is the way we live our lives in Northern Ireland across all the communities. If it needs to be done, we actually do it. However, the big thing that has come out when I look around and speak to the women - I was with the women yesterday - is that 99% of people say the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and that gap is getting bigger. Without women in particular, the work that the women's centres do, and which other community workers right across Northern Ireland do, we would not have the tourist trade that we have. If we were not doing our jobs, who wants to go to Belfast if there is rioting? Who wants to travel? Who wants to set up their business if there is a fear of their business being petrol-bombed? We have made that sustainable but we are getting nothing out of those profits that we have made happen over the years. I want to see tourism but I want the people who actually look over at Titanic quarter to be able to afford to go into it. If you are taking a family of four into the Titanic quarter, in the most deprived area, it costs £100 to get in. There are no concessions, no nothing. We are not sharing in that but it is the people in the communities who have actually made tourism happen and made that infrastructure. Every time there is something being built now, you can bet your life it is because of tourism and not because of the people who actually lived there and came through the worst of the conflict.

I will leave it there because I am getting on a soapbox at the minute, and I do not want to be.