Ms Andrée Murphy:

I thank the committee for the invitation and particularly for paying attention to the need to apply a gender lens on the constitutional debate. It is very welcome. I also thank and pay tribute to this committee for its unstinting focus on victims and survivors of the conflict. From Relatives for Justice, in particular, I thank the committee for its engagement with the British legacy Act, the threat it posed to the Good Friday Agreement and for the committee’s strength on it and its consideration of it in a most victim-centred way. Focusing on victims' needs and rights and victim-centredness was so important.

This committee’s rigorous approach to the examination of the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and all that flows from it is the correct place to have a conversation on how to ensure equal gender participation is included in the wider constitutional conversation. The Good Friday Agreement was a stand-out international peace agreement that we are all justly proud of. That praise, however, does not forgive the reality that the agreement itself did not deal with the past at the time. However, by ensuring that in its DNA it is a document framed by the European Convention on Human Rights, it provided the pathway and hope for victims and survivors. While, in 1998, some wanted to leave the past behind and not mention our conflict, by 2014, with the Stormont House Agreement, the body politic of both Irish and British Governments and all parties on this island recognised that the human rights obligations of everybody and the rights of victims and survivors will not only not go away and have much to contribute to peace building. They are not a barrier to that. That was all possible because of the Good Friday Agreement.

Notwithstanding that, the unilateral legacy Act 26 years later, which deals with the past, is the standout failure of our peace process, but that is not to place a full stop on that narrative. That the Irish Government is defending the rights of victims and survivors in the interstate case speaks to the dynamic and invested approach to remedying those previous failures, and that is also true of this committee. It is also important to note there are many people in this committee who have been stalwarts in trying to remedy that and to ensure the rights of victims and survivors become part of our peace narrative and become something the Good Friday Agreement in its broadest sense does pay attention to. I pay particular tribute to the work of the Chair, Deputy O'Dowd, on the disappeared. We would all acknowledge that we did not deal with the experience of disappearances during the conflict in a way that was human rights compliant or in a way that makes sense to the broader peace agreement. Piecemeal approaches fail everyone. The type of work the Chair has put into that experience is very important.

Just as many point to Britain’s failures on Brexit as an opportunity to learn positive lessons for our constitutional debate, so too our failures on dealing with the past can inform our national debate in a positive way. Those failures, and the subsequent efforts to remedy them, can inform the constitutional debate on what not do, not least regarding gender. It gives us hope we can do better. It is not only desirable but essential and possible.

A constitutional conversation cannot and will not leave our past behind. Our shared future, whether that involves constitutional change or remaining with two jurisdictions, will carry the past with us. It will carry the hurts, pains, traumas, violations and human rights obligations that are implied in the wider discussions on dealing with the past. There is a danger in this conversation that, just as in 1998, we do not deal with the past as part of this conversation and that we prefer to avoid it and talk about the future because talking about the past might feel uncomfortable and may become difficult. Yes, it is tricky to deal with the past. There are no two ways about that, but that makes it all the more necessary. The lesson of the past 26 years is that the sky does not fall in when we do address the past. Whether that is disappearances, systemic state abuses on this island or the Bloody Sunday inquiry, when we dealt with tricky issues and addressed them in an open and honest human rights way, we were all the better for it. While there remains much to be done, we as a population have learned we are better for facing our truths and our paths in a collective way, and we must continue that path to build better for the future.

One of the other lessons of our efforts to deal with the past is that we have also failed to apply a gender lens. We have abjectly failed to ensure women are equal participants in the processes of dealing with the past and, in that way, we have created a blind spot for women who have been harmed. That applies from the Good Friday Agreement to Eames Bradley to the Stormont House Agreement and, of course, to the legacy Act. This directly informs the constitutional debate. Where we have created blind spots on dealing with the past on gender, we will carry them into the processes for shaping the debate on a new Ireland unless we do what the committee has done today and pay attention to gender.

Despite the reality that women were disproportionately affected by our conflict, this blind spot persists. Some 91% of those who were killed were men and boys. Obviously that has implications for gender for all of us, yet we continue to ignore those profound implications. We only treat women in the most passive ways, as next of kin in legal processes or maybe eyewitnesses when they have so much more to offer. We have not quantified the gender-specific violations and harms that were experienced. There is no definition for the harms experienced in the private sphere such as the domestic and sexual violence perpetrated by the military actors of the conflict, both state and non-state. These are still seen as domestic incidents. We have a scheme for the permanently injured which treats them as such. This is unconscionable in this day and age.

Women experience trauma differently in their bodies. They will engage with health professionals differently and will be the caregivers in families affected by transgenerational trauma. Mothers whose children were killed during the conflict experience their trauma not as a secondary harm but as a primary harm. We need to inform our health systems, our judicial system and our support systems. That kind of gender lens can carry into the constitutional debate and inform us all for the better. Only applying a gender lens to building process affords us the unquantifiable opportunity this presents. Imagine if this island, after our centuries of shared history, built a trauma-informed, gender-sensitive mental health system. That could be restoration, reparation and ground breaking. It would truly create a new Ireland no matter what decision we might make on our jurisdictions.

We can do better and our past tells us that. We can only do it by applying a gender lens to our understanding of the past, our understanding of the contribution of women and the processes of discussing constitutional change. It is an opportunity to create hopeful and better conversations. When it is participative and framed by human rights, it has the best chance of not leaving anyone behind, as Reverend Sethuraman has said, or creating blind spots. Participation of this nature will be reconciliation in itself. It is a process of reconciliation and acknowledgement. An informed recognition of our past informs a better future that is human rights-complaint, values peace, and our peace agreement.