Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

I very much support what Ms DeSouza has just been saying, which is absolutely true. It was certainly a source of disappointment to me that funding from the shared island unit in regard to women had to be fought for, in the first instance, and, second, was not sufficient and was a tiny proportion of the overall fund of the unit. It now seems to have completely dried up. That gives us an indication that there is no understanding of just how important it is to invest in the sector, if I can call women a sector, which seems peculiar. Of course, this is a historical situation that keeps being repeated. We have to keep coming back with questions like “Why did that thing only run for two years?” or “Why was there not more investment?”

One of the things that emerged from the All-Island Women's Forum became apparent during the two residential sessions. My experience of the work we have done North and South over the years is that when we bring women together for a couple of hours, that is great and it does something, but when we bring them together for two or three days to work together and also to spend social time together, we get huge breakthroughs. There is no silo anymore and they are simply working together as people. There is the notion of co-operation and how they can work together to tackle the issues of, for example, gender-based violence, reproductive rights, childcare or care for children with disabilities. All of that becomes part of the everyday conversation and the suspicions and fears that exist in both parts of the island for the other part are quickly dissipated.

It is a mystery to me why smart, intelligent policymakers do not get that point because it is very basic. You bring people together and give them the possibility within a structure of getting to know one another, and they do. They find what they have in common. They also find what they do not agree about and if they are there for long enough, they start to try to work that out, talk it through and see which bits they can go with and which bits do not actually work. There is a big change in cultural attitude still to be made in this particular arena when talking about constitutional reconfiguration and so on. Gender really matters, and that gender means women and it means investment in women.