Ms Eileen Weir:

I think it has to be driven by all three. It would be okay for the Irish Government to drive it if everything was quiet and there was not a question around the constitutional question, but if the Irish Government drive something like that, it could be translated in a different way. It has to be genuine. It is about engaging in the conversation with the other two parties. Sound them out; that is what we do in the community. We go to the grassroots and we ask them what the issues are. We try to draw it out. Can we sit down and have a conversation about this? That is what we have done with the constitutional question. We have had a conversation to talk about the issues. What is the point of not talking about it? We want to inform people but we do inform them that there may come a time where civic society will have a vote. We are asking them what they would like to see? Most of them are asking am I going to be better off or am I going to be worse off? That is really it, and the end of the day, it is social and economic.

From a personal point of view, I am going to go wherever I am going to be socially and economically better off.

I am not going to sign on to something that will make me worse off than I already am. I need to see those figures in front of me to make that decision. We are starting to have a conversation but that could be five, 15 or 20 years down the line and we are not even talking about the bill of rights. It is not logical to talk about something that may or may not happen and civic society will have the final decision on that but we have something in the Good Friday Agreement for which 71.2% of people have voted and we do not even have a conversation around it. We are having that conversation at grass roots level but we cannot get our political parties or governments to agree to implement it. That was probably a mistake by those who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement. We should have had an implementation body at that time to make sure that it was being implemented in the way it was supposed to be implemented.

The petition of concern was only to be implemented in the case of a fear against one culture or the other but it is being used for everything now. People were so happy to get it and the hope was there in the Good Friday Agreement. We have it on paper and in a document now and people have voted for this. The Irish and UK Governments back away and we allow Stormont to run it. There should have been something put in place at that time. There is no point in looking back and saying in hindsight. We are never too late to make people's lives better and that is what the bill of rights will do.