Ms Aingeal O?Donoghue:

It is about to open. Everything has been done. The last piece was the signing of the financing agreement between the UK and the EU and that has happened. It is literally about to be opened. We see the reconciliation fund as a specific, targeted fund. Our colleagues in the Department of Foreign Affairs would agree with that. It is current funding. We are trying to bring a different thing to the table. One of the interesting things that came out in the dialogues was that there was a sort of gap with regard to funding greater civic society engagement as the reconciliation fund was not quite in that area.

As a result, we looked at how we would fill that gap. That is how there is now the civic society fund, which is operated by the Department of Foreign Affairs but jointly funded by the shared island unit and the Department of Foreign Affairs.