Mr. David Holloway:

I will make a brief statement on behalf of Community Dialogue, as part of the Peace Summit Partnership. First, however, I want to strongly echo and reinforce everything Ms Weir said, in particular in reference to the question: where is our bill of rights? It is about implementation, implementation, implementation. In paragraph 2 of the agreement's declaration of support, on page 1, it states: "We ... dedicate ourselves to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust, and to the protection and vindication of the human rights of all". Community Dialogue has been engaging civic society in dialogue on the unfinished business of the agreement with a particular focus on that paragraph, whose intention, sadly, remains woefully unfulfilled. From January 2022 to the present, we have delivered 31 or 32 engagements with approximately 300 marginalised people, reflective of the diversity of our society: people from areas of deprivation, urban and rural; women's groups; the LGBTQ+ community; loyalists and republicans; people with mental health issues; community workers; peacebuilding practitioners; and ethnic, faith and other minorities. We have about a dozen recurring themes across all those dialogues. I will briefly highlight six of them.

First, we need an updated, more inclusive peace plan responding to an evolving peacebuilding context and to emerging social cohesion challenges, in particular the emerging challenge of growing diversity. As our consultation progresses, this issue is becoming more and more prominent and we are finding that especially for young adults we engage with and the ethnic minority communities we engage with.

Second, systems and structures are uniformly viewed as failing to respond meaningfully to rising levels of general intolerance and increasing polarisation across our society, perceived to be a direct result of social media misinformation and the rising tide of objective truth denial.

Third, respondents generally believe that our government is failing to address shared social needs for the common good, in particular issues relating to poverty such as social housing, integrated living, childcare, the cost of living and healthcare, and, in particular, within healthcare, mental healthcare.

Fourth, our respondents remain unhappy that 26 years on, the agreement has yet to be fully implemented.

They focus in particular on the continuing unaddressed and unresolved needs of victims and survivors of our conflict and on the continuing blight of paramilitarism on our communities and, more recently, the belief that paramilitaries are inciting anti-immigrant sentiment.

Fifth, an integrated system of education as our society's norm continues to be a priority with our respondents, who view it as playing a vital role in evolving a united and cohesive society in the future.

Sixth, there is a general sense of powerless frustration with our continuing societal focus on voting, not in response to shared social issues and needs but, rather, to keeping the other side out. This is believed to diminish our democracy and to ensure that shared social issues remain unresolved and that sectarian politics continue under the mantle of our agreement's power-sharing arrangements.