Ms Eileen Weir:

It is in most cases. I have young women coming to me and telling me they would be afraid to go up the Shankill Road. Now, they are 21 years old and I tell them this is their parents' trauma. They tell me what their daddies always say to them is not to wear their uniforms if they go up there and not to be doing this and that and the other. That is the trauma of those parents. It is very basic and is being transferred on to another generation. It is a well-educated generation and we need these young people. The particular young woman who spoke to me was terrified, but this was the transference of someone else's fear onto her.

Turning to the question on the bill of rights, we have done many consultations on it. I really do not know all that we need to cover in it. I am not an academic and I do not want to be one. I want whatever they do, though, to be put into easy language so I can take it to the grassroots level. I do know, though, and I will leave this with the committee, about a statement I got from the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. It consulted 160 civic society organisations across all communities and sectors in all areas of Northern Ireland. Members of NGOs, trade unions, charities and grassroots community groups from every section of our society were included to bring them together to work towards achieving the goal of a rights-based society in Northern Ireland. I will leave this document with the committee.

The things being asked for are our basic rights. We are not asking to be given a pay rise that we have not had in 30 years. It is not about giving us more money. It is about making where we live safe. It is about making people queuing at food banks not ashamed to ask to be paid a proper living wage and not a minimum wage. Some of the accommodation being given out could involve a two-bedroom house and six people. In other cases, houses with stairs are being given out to people who have severely disabled children. There are, therefore, many social and economic things that we need to put into the bill of rights to ensure we can live and have a proper education.

We have young people leaving school who still cannot spell the name of the streets they live on. Why are young people being allowed to leave school with no education when we have paid for it from the age of five? At the age of 16, they are coming out and still cannot read. We need to be looking at the systems to ensure our education institutions are fit for purpose for the generations there now. We must look at our curriculum to ensure it is providing an appropriate education. Not everybody is going to go to university. Those who do want to go should have that pathway available to them but there should also be pathways available for those who are not that way inclined. There should be a right to work and a right to a job.

We lost a lot of industry during our conflict, some of it rightly and some of it wrongly. It does not matter, though, because it was all still employment. When we look at what happened, we can see that we lost the shipyards, the Mackie factory, the Sirocco Ropeworks, all our stitching industry and all our mills. They ceased to exist during the conflict. We had hundreds of thousands of people employed who then became unemployed and no effort has been made to retrain those people to take up the jobs that were required.

There is much, then, that could be included. I have spoken to different people from different groups, from victim and survivor groups, about the bill of rights. It is sitting on the shelf and no one is even having a discussion about it. It may take a while to implement such a bill of rights, but people should at least sit down and have this discussion.

Why are we talking about constitutional change when we cannot even get a committee together across the UK, Ireland and Stormont, to discuss the bill of rights? Why do we not have that? We have a UN Security Council Resolution 1325 committee in Stormont, but it is not applicable in Northern Ireland. Why have a committee on something unless they are going to give it to us? There would be stuff in that which would give women more rights.

We do not have a seat at a table of negotiation. I work across 26 interfaces and was a representative at an interface. I do not have a seat at that table. I am not invited to that table. I want to be at that table and a lot of other women want to be at that table. We have got women who have come through our programmes and are now ready to have their voices heard. It has taken a while but they are there. Even to discuss the basic rights such as education, food and standard of living, people say enough is enough; enough is not enough. I want justice for families who have suffered for 30 years. We are 30 years behind everything because we had no politics for 30 years as we were too busy fighting. There was only one type of politics then. It was us and them.

We used to be way ahead of the Irish Government on a lot of things. Now they are way ahead of us on a lot of things because we had 30 years of no political decisions being made for civic society on economic and social change. It was always about the conflict. It was always about the orange and green. We are fed up. All the women who I work with, and that is many, are fed up too. There are so many different opinions among them and they do not always agree but they are fed up of not being treated like human beings. They are fed up of not even having a bill of rights that gives them the right to have an education system that works, a health service that works, proper houses that they can live in and a decent standard of living where they do not have to borrow money to take their kids away for the weekend to a caravan park. That is what is happening.

Our whole society is being let down because we do not have that social impact and economy. If that is done, I tell you, everything else will grow from that. We are the roots. Trees only grow if they are rooted. If you are not rooted in communities or in civic society we will just go around in circles. We need somebody brave enough to sit down and say "Right, let us have a committee. Let us talk about this. Let us see what we can do." Bring civic society in, bring the Human Rights Commission in and bring the Equality Commission in. Those people are actually down at grass roots level asking us what we think.