Ms Emma DeSouza:

In short, I do not think it is working well. My experience is that I started with the National Women's Council of Ireland in 2021. That was my first entry into working more deliberatively within the women's sector. I found there was a lot of separation North and South. I felt that the women's sector had become siloed and much of that has to do with funding restrictions. A lot of work needs to happen to increase capacity on an all-island basis and to see these things as an all-island issue.

The All-Island Women's Forum, of which I was chair and facilitator for its first term, was extremely effective and created very robust recommendations that looked at things such as having a permanent space for civic engagement, having an all-island media strategy or some kind of North-South collaboration that would increase women's voices within the media landscape and look at things such as violence against women and cross-Border education. We worked very hard to create those recommendations and the implementation of any one of them would be effective. Since that time, the All-Island Women's Forum has lost its funding and that structure is very limited now in terms of what it will be able to do in the future, as is the Encounters programme that my friend Ms Smyth was also working on.

As regards a regular, permanent structure, there is not enough regular engagement on an all-island basis and there is not enough funding available. If the women's sector were given more strategic funding, it would be much more effective. There is so much capacity within the sector to address the areas Ms Eastwood mentioned, including health, social mobility and education. From my experience of the Civic Initiative regional workshops looking at those particular issues - we also had a woman-specific one for that - there were so many fantastic, innovative and ambitious ideas at a community level that would make this place so much better, but they are not being heard, harnessed, supported or funded.

What this place needs is a permanent all-island focus and a structure that is going to be able to achieve it. We could look at having an independent body of some kind that is properly funded and that will bring together all those community groups and all the different arms, including the business community, academia and the different elements. However, it has to be something that is not going to disappear in two years.