Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

That is a fair question. We would very much like to have done an evaluation but there was no funding for it and, in fact, there was minimal funding for the programme. While it was not so much an admission as a hope that bringing like-minded groups together would open up the possibility of co-operative work, what can be accomplished in a two-hour encounter is very limited. The fact that anything at all emerges from it is kind of a miracle and a tribute to the women who were involved in those conversations. Where it tended to work best was where there were two organisations meeting up, for example, the Women's Aid Federation and Women's Aid. They had a prior connection and although it had dissipated a bit, there was already some kind of connection, which meant the encounter gave them a boost to move forward and reawakened their appetite to work together. It was a similar situation with the Rainbow Project and LGBT Ireland and those occasions worked very well, as did those involving the Women's Collective Ireland and the Shankill and Falls centres.

Others were much more difficult. We had a meeting in Leitrim between Herstory and Women in Loyalism. It was a very interesting meeting and conversation but it was difficult for it to move forward. It would have needed further encounters and more time to develop and mature into something that might happen practically on the ground. Although it was still worth doing, there were areas that we could not really reach. We wanted very much to bring Traveller women from North and South together but it was very difficult to set that up. We would have needed a community development worker working with us to help us with that and also to further the encounters between migrant groups.

In all of that, it was about mapping out a good number of the groups that we want to be able to reach. It was almost a kind of a learning as to where it works and where we need a lot more structure and funding.

It is really about having structures in place that are funded. We have often made the point that anything this committee can do in terms of recommendations for furthering this kind of co-operative, collaborative work is so important.

One of the issues that really struck me during the Encounters programme and in some subsequent work with women in which I was involved is that we focus a lot, rightly, on the situation in terms of how things work for women in the North. Often, however, there is not enough emphasis or understanding that women in the South, in community-based situations across the board, have very little understanding and experience of the North of Ireland. It may be different for Deputy Tully and others in Border counties. However, we had a group from Kerry, for example, participating in a women's collective, who met with a group from the North. This was not part of the Encounters programme; it was another programme. The Kerry women had never been to the North of Ireland and out of the group from the North of Ireland, only one had been to Dublin. The fear, suspicion and misperceptions were enormous. Then there was a relief and what can only be described as a kind of joy in discovering we are all just real people.

That opening up of dialogue leads, in turn, to at least the possibility of broaching the difficult political issues. They are difficult, as we all know, but they cannot even be broached until the other fears and suspicions are addressed and the ice is broken. These are processes that take a long time. I always wanted to be able to bring taoisigh, tánaistí, Deputies, Ministers and I do not know whatnot into those environments to look at the work that can be done if there is a structure, some patience and a real willingness to listen. It is about sitting back and listening to what is happening there.