Ms Eileen Weir:

They are saying now what I have been saying for ten years. Anyone who knows me knows I have said everything came through a hard time. Ms Hanna knows I gave evidence to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee and what is being discussed now is what I said way back then. A lot of loyalist prisoners who came out of prison who are doing fantastic work in the communities. They may be very few and far between but they are there and still doing fantastic work. There are also those, however, who still want to carry that badge of honour. Paramilitary organisations need to disown those people. I always hear about drug dealing but it is not always drug dealing. There is also coercive control, money lending and trafficking going on with these organised crimes. It is not just about drugs. All I hear about is drugs but that is not the case; it is everything. I know of a young man owed drug money. He was either going to get a bullet in the head or his sister was trafficked until his debt was paid, and that is what actually happened. These are horror stories. Derry has done that research, and the Women’s Resource and Development Agency, WRDA, and the Women’s Support Network has also done all that research in the Belfast area, and we are getting the same thing across the province.

We can keep continuing one wee project on, say, the Shankill and another wee project on the Falls, but what I would like to see and the work I have been doing for many years is saying that if anyone wants to have a loyalist event, say, then they must pair up with someone who wants to do a republican event and let us share the information with each other. I firmly believe that our Good Friday Agreement should go into our schools because our young people are being told lies that the Good Friday Agreement was brought in for the nationalist community and the Protestant community got nothing. I am talking about bringing that into schools, both North and South and not just the North, and educating people on why we have a Good Friday Agreement, how we got there and the trouble we had getting there, instead of people listening and being recruited to sell drugs which leads to other stuff which leads to other stuff. I believe it is peace money and you have to have a partner in peace money before you can get funding, and it has to be working together and sharing together and not putting one group in their wee silo and another in theirs. We need this reconciliation. It is peace building. We have done 26 years of peace building. Communities, no matter what community it is, should be ready to make that step. If they are not, what have they been doing for the last 26 years? We need to do it holistically and under the community development umbrella right across the whole sector, whether it is men, women or young people. We need to look at the whole thing holistically and doing it down the road.

I was with a lot of the loyalist prisoners when they were released under the Good Friday Agreement. I could name the ones who went down the community development route but, unfortunately, others did not and they went down the gangster route. It went on so long that it is hard now. I am glad to see this is hitting the air because I have been living with that daily. Those people are torturing their own communities. Paramilitary organisations were set up, believe it or not, to protect their community, but now they are putting their communities at a level of fear.

I am not saying it is everybody but lot of people I work with say their fear of their own community is greater than the fear of the other community now. We have changed and that is a question I ask: what is the difference now 30 years later? The difference is they fear their own community more than they fear the other.