I have no problem. I will make up for it, the Chairman need not worry.
I am retired as chief executive of Co-operation Ireland almost six years and it is nice to be back meeting the committee. Many of the arguments we are advancing I was probably advancing six or seven years ago when I was speaking to the committee's predecessors. The peace monitoring report quite rightly states there has been very substantial progress but if we were honest with ourselves, 20 years after the ceasefires and 16 years after the agreement, even those of us who knew it was a generational issue thought we would be further on than this.
I will pick up on a number of points. The Haass talks have been mentioned quite a lot. It is essential that there is resolution around the proposals. They were not Haass's proposals. They were proposals he distilled from the inter-party talks. I always felt they should have been called the inter-party talks chaired by Haass rather than Haass getting the blame for them because it was the local people who were involved. It is essential that those are sorted, but it is not sufficient. The Haass proposals are essentially dealing with the political elements and a number of matters around that and, subsequently, there will still be the work that needs to be done on reconciliation.
The issue of leadership has come up a few times. There should be leadership, but one of the problems has been that leadership has been sporadic. A couple of years ago, the First Minister, Mr. Peter Robinson MLA, showed leadership by turning up at Casement Park to watch a GAA match with the Deputy First Minister, Mr. Martin McGuinness MLA, but that was it. It happened and then it disappeared afterwards. The British Government has been criticised here - I agree with a lot of that - but it was not only the British Government that lost focus. The Irish Government lost focus as well. Understandably, given the economic circumstances that were being dealt with down here, it was certainly something that went off the radar.
What one needs is leadership, but one needs it within a clear policy context. There are clear statements about what should be done, both in the Northern Ireland programme for Government and in the Good Friday Agreement. It is about a full range of work, but what we have got, as mentioned in section 1 of the short leaflet on the peace monitoring report, is:
the model on offer from the top is peace without reconciliation. A culture of endless negotiation has become embedded and, without a vision of a shared society to sustain it, the peace process has lost the power to inspire.
That is almost exactly it.
We need to look at what we do in Government Departments - this is North-South as well as inside Northern Ireland. Programmes should not divide. They should not encourage separation. One should be looking positively at ways in which actions that are taken encourage peaceful cross-Border co-operation. There has been a lot of progress made on that, although there is still some way to go.
Mr. Osborne spoke about a regional body that should oversee this. There is a regional body that should oversee this and since I am no longer on it, I can say this and spare his blushes. That regional body is the Community Relations Council, which should be empowered to take greater responsibility in overseeing this work.
We need to address the issues of security. If members can get a copy of the Irish News from Tuesday of this week, it spoke about the divisions that exist in housing. A housing executive spokesman stated that there are over 500 symbols of paramilitary murals, monuments, etc., in estates throughout Northern Ireland and it was difficult to stop this happening because the estates were single-identity estates. A single-identity estate, in plain English, is an estate where persons cannot live because they are the wrong religion because it is either completely Catholic and a Protestant would be afraid to live there or completely Protestant and a Catholic would be afraid to live there. A single-identity estate is a polite way of saying it is a estate where the minority, whichever it is, has been intimidated and has left. What the police advises the housing executive is that although it is within its power to take these symbols down, the police felt it would cause too much community contention. What that means is that illegal paramilitary organisations would attack those who took the symbols down. Therefore, we are in an environment where these symbols exist in estates that have been made single-identity estates and the police is advising that nothing be done about it because there will be riots. That is a collapse in law and order and it needs to be dealt with.
We know what needs to be done. It has been working steadily for years - I did it in Co-operation Ireland. One brings people together at the community level on what they have in common. One gets them to trust each other and talk to each other. Then one gets them to honestly explore their differences and start to understand where each other is coming from.
Although it is most acute in the Protestant working class at present, this is not exclusively a Protestant problem. When one hears loyalist organisations talk about the lack of political leadership, what they mean, in fact, is that people do not vote for them. On the Protestant side, people still vote and the Northern Ireland level of voting is still high. There may be a lack of political leadership but the politicians still get votes. I am not sure any of the members here would like to be accused of a lack of political leadership because constituents were not voting for somebody else rather than themselves, and the members need to look at that as a political point.
I will give a couple of specific examples of useful incidents that can happen but fall by the wayside. Ten years ago Co-operation Ireland, together with the Centre for Cross-Border Studies and the then Institute of Public Administration, ran a training course over ten weeks with civil servants from North and South. They got together, they carried out joint projects and they heard lectures about each other's political system. We based this on what had been done in the precursor of the Europe Union after the Second World War when French civil servants went to work in Germany and German civil servants went to work in France to develop understanding. We ran this on approximately €20,000 a programme. We got funding from the Special EU Programmes Body for a while. It collapsed because we were unsuccessful in persuading both the Irish and British, and Northern Ireland, Governments that this was a programme worth sustaining. It is a cheap and easy way of bringing people together and developing understanding, but it went to the wall.
The issue of culture has come up. Culture is vitally important and Derry City of Culture was a tremendously strong example of what had been done. Derry City of Culture is replicated in a range of other cultural events, such as Féile and the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. There is a range of events across Northern Ireland, all of which have heard in the past week that their funding is being chopped by the Department of Trade and Industry because the Tourist Board will no longer fund cultural events. To show that none of this is costless, the Twaddell Avenue protest costs £40,000 a night to police. The funding that is being cut from 61 cultural organisation is one month of policing of the Twaddell Avenue protest. There are real costs in this regard.
Another place where there are real costs are schools, as members mentioned. I suggest at some stage the committee ask for information on the unit costs of training teachers in Northern Ireland. If the committee is told the truth, it will be told that the unit cost of teacher training in Northern Ireland is 40% higher than in other parts of the United Kingdom because there are separate education systems and separate colleges. One of the odd aspects right the way through is that we have relied on schools and teachers to promote reconciliation. One takes children who go to a single-religion school, one sends them to a single-religion teacher training college, and then one sends them back into a single-religion school and states it is their responsibility to promote cross-religious work. Most of these teachers' lives have been outside this. Co-operation Ireland ran a programme for years called Civic-Link, which brought schools together in a structured way looking at projects over a year but it has also gone because of the absence of funding. These programmes fail to be funded right the way through.
We are facing a funding crisis because the rest of the world has got fed up funding the reconciliation programme in Northern Ireland. More funding came from the European Union, through the PEACE programme, and from others, primarily the Americans, through the International Fund for Ireland, than both Governments put in for on-the-ground reconciliation throughout these years. Although the Reconciliation Fund is a good one, and one of its nice aspects is it is much less bureaucratic than most others in that one expects returns but it is not dreadful, it is still at a comparatively low level. It has always seemed odd that Northern Ireland is one of the most affluent places of conflict across the world but it expects all of its funding to come from the rest of the world. The poor sods in South Africa had to fund theirs themselves. Sierra Leone had to do so also.
Everywhere else had to fund it themselves, but Northern Ireland expected the rest of the world to pay for it. The Governments and the people should be paying for this sort of thing.
We are at an odd stage. Substantial progress has been made, but there has been a belief that politics alone is enough to do it. In reality, it requires long, slow, patient work of bringing people together. It is not enough just to bring Catholics and Protestants together. Every time Rangers play Celtic in Scotland, many Catholics and Protestants come together but it does not promote peace and reconciliation. It must be done in a sustained, managed, co-ordinated way. People must feel safe. If people feel their culture is being threatened, that is not cured by saying "that's tough". It is cured by working out the threats, getting people to talk it through, and building a long, sustained programme. It needs proper investment, and we do not have any of that at the moment. I ask this committee to go back and ask what the Irish State's sustained, co-ordinated programme for developing reconciliation within Northern Ireland and between North and South is. What are different departments required to do? What are the measures against which we assess their performance? The chair mentioned at the beginning the need for an outcome-based approach. What outcomes is the Irish State seeking from this and how is progress measured? Likewise for the British State and the Executive. If it is not measured, it is not done. By doing that, one begins to clarify it.
It will not be me, because I will shortly be off community relations completely, but I suggest that this committee invites the Community Relations Council back annually to report on the state of play.
