Ms Eileen Weir:

I thank the committee for the invite. It was a long travel down this morning without coffee on the train, to put something light on it. As for my role, I am a grassroots peacebuilder in the area of good relations for the past 50 years. It has been an uphill struggle, particularly when community organisations at grassroots level - not just the women's movement but right across the sector, such as our youth movement and others - that have maintained and worked with the Good Friday Agreement are finding it difficult because of the lack of investment in those organisations to keep the doors open.

We have not seen any peace dividend in the areas I work in, which are in north Belfast, which was the worst hit with all the conflict. The fact that more peace walls are being put up after the Good Friday Agreement tells us what we are working with at grassroots level. We cannot encourage our young people to come into these roles because who would want to do so with a year's funding put on the table for us to be able to keep peace at grassroots level?

I am looking at this from a different aspect. We would not have a tourism trade if it were not for the community workers working on the ground, at grassroots level, who have maintained the peace since the Good Friday Agreement and maintained it prior to the agreement. Businesses would not be coming to this island if there were trouble in the North. The people who have kept that trouble at bay have been the community workers, who are the last to be thought of when it comes to this round of funding, even this year. We have just been told recently that there is another 10% cut and we have to try to find 20% of the money we have applied for to keep the doors open. Community organisations were getting dumped on long before Covid, and we have been struggling. I am only speaking for community workers. Those are the people with whom and for whom I have a voice. We are not getting what we voted for in the Good Friday Agreement. I have been involved with a lot of implementation bodies and I have seen no implementation in the past 30 years or even somebody set up to look at implementation.

We need our Civic Forum back but we also need that forum to be representative of civic society in the North. When the Good Friday Agreement was made, it was made maybe on the basis of orange and green. We are no longer an orange-green society, so our civic society needs to form part of a civic forum. The committee hears from voluntary and community organisations. I am on the Belfast Women's Assembly, which was established by community workers and university lecturers setting up committees, non-funded, on a voluntary basis, to try to move things forward. Most of us have given 50 years. Our young ones are not going to give that same time because they will leave this island and go somewhere else if there is no investment put in. I do not want to talk about funding; I want investment. We were promised investment through the Good Friday Agreement. We were promised a peace dividend through the agreement. We are not seeing it and we have not got it.

The debate at the minute about paramilitarism is a bit of a joke. Twenty-six years on from the Good Friday Agreement, we are still talking about paramilitarism. We have gangsters and gangs who carry the names of paramilitary organisations. The paramilitaries have actually said, "They do not belong to us." Why is the justice system not taking that on board?

We are tackling everything. I do not sit in an office every day. Most community workers, including me, are out at night at interfaces talking to the people who are still being traumatised by not getting their cases heard in court to get the truth of what happened to their loved ones during the Troubles.

There is still an awful lot that needs to be done. I would like to see the Irish and British Governments honour their pledge that they would be the ones that would oversee the Good Friday Agreement and set something up. They have put all the things down that Mr. Attwood has spoken about, and every other committee that has come down here and everybody who has spoken to the committee are all saying the same. I know they are all saying the same; I watch it online. We are not getting anything done.

The biggest thing for me is a bill of rights. It is a disgrace that we do not have a bill of rights for Northern Ireland. The last time I was here, I had bullet-pointed the things. The British Government does not seem to be interested in it, and the Irish Government does not seem to be that interested in it either. It is a disgrace that people in Northern Ireland are still shouting out for a bill of rights that we should have had many, many years ago. Until we have that, we can forget about talking about the constitutional question because if we do not have what we voted for, why would we change anything?