Ms Michelle Gildernew:

I thank all the witnesses for being here today. I am really sorry that I am not there in person. I would have loved to have been there but, unfortunately, I am in London so I am only able to engage this way. It has been a fascinating discussion and a really positive event. The committee has engaged significantly with the witnesses. I would love to visit as well. I would love to talk to some of the young people.

I will start with the point just made by the Chairman. It is really important to have young people who are role models for other young people. I am the mother of children aged 20, 16 and 13. My 20-year-old child's girlfriend works in youth work as well. She is part of a young women's group in Coalisland that does brilliant work. They are passing on the empowerment they were encouraged to have. One piece of work they are doing involves period poverty. They are going into schools and talking to children in primary schools about periods and issues around their bodies. That is far more powerful coming from a youth group than it would be coming from a teacher or others. It is young people talking to slightly younger people about issues they will face. That is really important.

Unfortunately, our youth services have often been the low-hanging fruit and when funding has to be cut, that is one of the areas that seems to go first. It can sometimes be very hard to have youth provision, particularly in rural areas. It is harder to get those hard-to-reach young people outside towns and cities to engage. I listened very carefully to everything that was discussed.

On Brexit and the protocol, Ms Holohan's perception of Donegal, which would be very similar to mine on the Tyrone, Fermanagh, Monaghan border, was fascinating as was the point made by Ms Watter's on the protocol. I certainly felt that there was a great deal of anxiety in the run-up to the Brexit vote. I invited the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People, Ms Koulla Yiasouma, down to Dungannon to do an event with young people to try to listen to some of their concerns. It was a brilliant event where the young people and children were very engaged. At that stage we could not answer a great deal of the questions but the commissioner was brilliant in how she spoke to them. I feel that anxiety around Brexit, when the vote happened and when we went into that period afterwards, and their concerns were not taken into consideration and people used, and are using, young people now to wind them up about the protocol when their genuine fears around Brexit were, perhaps, not listened to to the same extent.

I know that we want young people to be engaged with this and we want to hear from them and it is very important that they are given space but, again, on the back of the point that Ms Watters made regarding educational attainment, I would very much like to hear what young people from working-class loyalist communities think about where that difficulty comes from. It is easy, perhaps, to blame the education system but we have to look beyond that.

I have outlined previously to the committee that I recall being on a committee in Stormont and John Simpson, the economist, said that there were children who were no longer suitable for an educational environment within a few miles radius of Stormont. These were children who were five, six and seven years of age. To say a child is no longer suitable for educational attainment is an awful blight on our society and we perhaps need to broaden that discussion into the cultural effects in our communities and to the value that is put on education. That is something I would very much like to engage young people on to see how they feel about it. Brexit is going to impact big time and not just on the funding and the opportunities around Erasmus.

Again, I completely take on board the point of view that many working-class young people did not see themselves as having those opportunities in the first place or could envisage themselves ten years onwards to see what these would be.

This has been a brilliant discussion which I have really enjoyed. I have learned a great deal and I want to thank all present for having come down to talk to us.