Ms Susan McCrory:

It is early days to speak about what is happening in Stormont because the politicians only just came back in and they have come back to a lot of problems. They came back to the problems of the 18 months when they were out. We are now getting fed from the Government that it wants to fix everything, it understands our healthcare has serious problems and it is there to fix them - it has not been there to fix them for 18 months - and then we are told that it does not have a budget. In the community even today, I am sitting without knowing what my budget is. I do not know and will possibly not know until December. I know there will be a budget but I do not know what it will be. I sit on a staff who have been offered their posts but I have not received a letter of offer yet because we do not have a budget. What has happened now is that we have moved into elections. That has put everything else on hold. We are continuously on hold. I would not say that is gendered. It is political.

At the end of the day, whatever politics people pick, they go with their parties, whether they are female or male. There is not necessarily strong female gender equality in any party. Does any political party look at the party and ask what it is doing on gender equality or what issues it needs to provide for women to get them more involved in politics? That is not really looked at. If some of the politicians are asked whether they understand UN Security Council Resolution 1325 they do not know what it is. There has to be an education of political parties to understand gender inequality and equally to understand poverty and disadvantage and what they mean for women, especially for women in grassroots communities. That gets lost in the whole mix of trying to do a whole national thing.

On strengthening a woman's voice at a grassroots level, to bring it to the level we have has taken years of working with the same woman so she gets to the point of being able to trust what is called "the other side" and being able to sit in the room with women from the other side, say what she believes in and feels and feels safe to do so. That has taken many years of individual work with women, bringing them forward. Our society has changed. It has got bigger. Its scope has changed and that has to be looked at. We cannot keep making our politics orange and green, although the conflict cannot be brushed under the carpet. It needs to be brought forward and nurtured in a way that we can keep going forward into a new Ireland, a new shared island or whatever is to be. There are many different strands to trying to sort this out.