Patricia Stephenson (Social Democrats)

I thank the witnesses for their presentation. The work the shared island fund has been doing is great. I think Deputy Maxwell spoke about the importance of building trust and how beyond these spaces and those of policymakers, we can get the general public, and particularly people who are not living in areas impacted and improved by the infrastructure projects, to understand what the fund is doing to bring people together. Ms Deane spoke in her statement or the report she shared about how over 4,000 people have participated in the various dialogues. Are there plans to scale them up for people beyond the usual suspects like civil society groups? I know LGBT Ireland has participated in all-island forums. I am thinking of people outside of those traditional spaces, so we are creating more space for "normal people", for want of a better term. Having that space for dialogue, meeting and community is an important piece to break down barriers and the othering that we sometimes can see across the island.

That links a little to the research. I love what I hear about making the research more tangible. However, I also wonder, beyond policymakers, about bringing those research reports back to affected communities. I think the Mind the Gap disability report was funded by the shared island civic forum. That was about workability and employment support programmes. It was a brilliant report. Bringing reports like that back to disability rights groups across the island and creating more spaces for those groups to get together and strategise would be interesting.

I am delighted to hear about the gender-based violence report. The work the National Women's Council does is fantastic, but how do we bring that back to women's groups beyond the larger national level groups? Bringing it back to communities would be important, as would using dialogues and spaces to present those reports back to communities to make it more interactive and action plan based. As well as having all the reports compiled together for policymakers, we should bring it back to communities so people feel that the reports are about and for them and that they can use them.

I do not know if the witnesses are familiar with the Mind the Gap report. I know we have talked about employment and Deputy Moynihan spoke about employment in general. I am particularly interested in disability employment and supportive employment programmes, and if there is scope for doing an all-island pilot on supportive employment for disability. It is a challenge. A lot of people with disabilities of different types are out of work long term. I know that at one stage the North had a co-ordinator who supported different disability rights organisations to apply for grants and funding for supported employment. It is something we do not have down here. I do not think we have ever had it. Is there anything in the pipeline around that? There were references to disability but I am wondering in particular about supported employment.

Those are most of my questions. I would love to see those research dialogues being scaled up and made more tangible for people outside of the policy spaces.