Ms Andrée Murphy:

What is important to note with regard to Resolution 1325, the women, peace and security resolution at the Security Council, is that it came in in 2000, two years after the peace agreement. Had that been there when we were negotiating the Good Friday Agreement, it would have been a different agreement because we would have had a stream that very clearly looked at the needs of women and their contribution to peace and security as part of the agreement. We do not have that. Instead, what we have is a contest between the two jurisdictions around how we will support the needs and rights of women who survived our conflict and who live in a transitional state. We have the Irish action plan, which is absolutely excellent and seen as a high standard in international terms, speaking to women in the North. There has not really been an action plan at all from Britain in quite a while, but even the previous one ignored it because they do not consider what we lived through as a conflict. They do not include it in their own action plan.

Women in the North, who are absolutely survivors of a conflict, do not have that kind of consistency or attention to their needs in the structured way at the United Nations and that really needs to be highlighted. If we think about this in a joined-up way, if we think about national action plans that are being devised, and really highly consultative and important processes for drawing up those action plans on a cross-jurisdictional basis, it is almost like a mini version of what we are talking about here in respect of constitutional change. They have been participative, cross-sectoral and really important. What was most important was the Irish Government paying attention to the needs and rights of women in the North with regard to their participation and the barriers they face as survivors of conflict.

Our dealing with the past processes have been influenced by not having Resolution 1325 as well. Had we had that application, we would absolutely have had a completely different dimension to how we viewed the rights to truth, justice and reparation. Reparation has often been left off the table, as the United Nations special rapporteur on transitional justice, Dr. Pablo de Greiff, pointed out in 2015. All of those things coalesce, and again it is that idea of the macro and the micro. If we have the big policy piece or framework which Resolution 1325 could offer us, then we could do so much more and really apply ourselves because we would have that framework. Women on the ground who have often felt silenced or invisible say, "Well, the United Nations sees me". That was the small work we did with our women, where they said they might not be seen by the Governments who say they pay attention but the United Nations sees them and their rights and talks a language they can actually relate to. It can be really empowering as well.