Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): We welcome to our meeting today Professor Hamber, who is director of the International Conflict Research Institute (INCORE) at Ulster University, and Professor Pete Shirlow, who is deputy director of the Institute for Conflict Transformation. The cover note in relation to this session from the Clerk is at page 136. Gentlemen — professors — you are both very welcome. Thank you for coming along. We did not get a paper from you, which is not an issue. I wonder whether you want to make some opening remarks.

Professor Brandon Hamber (Ulster University): Yes, we both will make some opening remarks.

Thank you very much for inviting me to address the Committee. I can only assume that you have invited me here in my capacity as a practitioner and researcher who has been working on peace building and reconciliation issues for the last two decades in a range of societies, as well as in my role as director of INCORE at Ulster University. With that in mind and given the limited time, I will restrict my five-minute opening comments to the issue of how the strategy might be seen within the global field of peace building and reconciliation.

The strategy outlines a vision of a united community:

I will not go on to read the rest of the vision; you are all familiar with it. I commend the Executive for this bold vision and the steps that they have started to take to realise that. It is also right that, as the strategy says, this is understood as a journey towards a more united and shared society. The idea of a journey is consistent with the notion of process, and most of the international literature on peace building and reconciliation talks about concepts as essentially processes, rather than as destinations in themselves.

The strategy recognises the damaging nature of societal division and seeks to:

It goes on to say that "division, intolerance, hate and separation", unless addressed, can damage individuals and communities in various ways, including in terms of economic prospects. In other words, the strategy itself highlights social segregation and separation as socially and economically problematic.

The core question, therefore, in reading the strategy is whether the actions outlined align with its vision and are adequate to make the types of changes needed to transform the society. I contend that the headline actions outlined in the strategy are steps in the right direction, but they are not sufficient to address the full weight of the problems that the strategy itself outlines.

For example, according to the Department of Education, there are 308,095 pupils enrolled in primary and post-primary schools. One cannot calculate with complete accuracy, but for illustrative purposes, that figure suggests that 100 summer school camps, engaging 100 pupils at post-primary level, would only reach 7% of pupils. Even if we bumped that up to 1,000 pupils attending each camp, we would only touch 70% of the pupils for a once-off and, no doubt, unwieldy series of events. Equally, extrapolating broadly across the school-going population, and assuming that every child is participating in these activities at post-primary level, 10 shared campuses would reach 3% to 4% of the total number of pupils over five years. That does not mean that such actions are useless or that they cannot be scaled up or grown. On the contrary, it has been well established in international and social psychological research for decades that, under certain conditions, contact between groups can promote positive views of one another. Any increase of contact between school-age children and young people representing different traditions is to be welcomed, but, as a recent report on shared education notes, an environment that seemingly reinforces a monoculture order can limit the potential success of any programme. It added, and I quote from Joanne Hughes:

In other words, contact programmes taking place within the overall segregated context that the strategy itself talks about, despite some positive potential, could essentially be seen as a sticking plaster on a system that is largely not conducive to creating positive attitudes between groups. It is possible to argue, for example, that shared education might be able to grow incrementally, or some of the other activities themselves might also be able to grow, and that seems implicit within the strategy. However, there is very little evidence that relatively small-scale cross-community projects taking place within a divided society will change the overall context substantially. International research suggests that contact programmes need to be complemented by substantial social change to be effective. Those who study the practice of conflict transformation globally name a peace that does not alter underlying forms of separation a "negative peace". This is a context where political violence has decreased, but the underlying issues that fuel the conflict have not been addressed.

Despite the boldness of the vision stated in the strategy, I ask the Committee to seriously assess whether the actions outlined in the strategy are adequate to achieve the objectives it lays out. From a policy perspective, it is counterintuitive to set up a range of new programmes to bring children and young people into meaningful contact with one another and in collaborative ventures at great expense in terms of resources and time, when the context itself is going to potentially undermine some of those achievements.

Of course, we all know that there are many reasons why the context cannot be changed instantly or overnight, and we must foster contact where we can. However, to lose sight of the fact that the most logical place to foster contact is in an integrated classroom, or in neighbourhoods where communities use the same services and recreational facilities on a day-to-day basis, is missing the most obvious and long-term solution to the problem that you are grappling with. What is needed is a large-scale policy with a timetable for breaking down the separation in daily life that the report talks about. That timetabling is evident in the strategy — for example, in the recommendation to remove the so-called peace walls by 2023 — but it is lacking in relation to other barriers to integration, such as schooling or residential mixing.

In conclusion, I welcome the steps which the strategy outlines towards achieving greater social contact between communities. However, I contend that, in the absence of a bolder social process to break down separation, they may not achieve the full impact that they are intended to have. In other words, the society will remain in a negative rather than a positive peace and will remain constantly at risk of ongoing and future conflict.

I thank you very much for your time and for inviting me to share my views.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Thank you very much indeed. From Ulster University to Queen's.

Professor Peter Shirlow (Queen's University Belfast): I note that you and I are wearing the same shirt. That does not denote political allegiance, necessarily.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): They are similar shirts; surely not the same.

Professor Shirlow: Yours is probably bespoke tailored.

I have to say —

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): What a great start.

Professor Shirlow: You have to set up a barrier between people.

Leading on from what has been said before, I am going to talk specifically about a piece of research that we have done that echoes a lot of what Brandon has just spoken about. It is known as the Northern Ireland Project. It is a longitudinal study of relationships between political violence, sectarianism and the well-being of children living in segregated communities in Belfast. It covers 24 interface areas within the city. It is conducted in partnership between the University of Notre Dame, the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, and the University of Ulster. The results that I am going to talk about here are from funding by the National Institutes of Health in the United States. The project was led by Professor Mark Cummings at the University of Notre Dame, who is a globally renowned psychologist. These notes have been prepared with the help of Laura Taylor, who has now recently moved to QUB, which means that we can continue with a lot of the work that we have been doing.

The study is based on what is known as an ecological process-oriented model. I will explain what that means when we get to the results. Basically it looks at the pathways between political and sectarian violence, and also political and sectarian antisocial behaviours. So we are looking at sectarianism as in being attacked, which we consider to be violence, and antisocial behaviour, which is name-calling, graffiti, etc. So it looks at the impact of that and also of crime within those communities, and it is based on family functioning and adolescent adjustment: how families and children cope with political violence, sectarian violence, sectarian antisocial behaviour, crime and other antisocial behaviour in the community.

Quite clearly, this country has taken very positive steps towards peace but, as you know, in a study like this we are studying families that are living in communities that are still highly segregated. We also know that these are places in which you will have much higher levels of recorded sectarian crime and where people are much more likely to experience antisocial behaviour. Of course, new forms of sectarianism have emerged in recent years, most notably through the internet. That has become another site where young people, in particular, trade sectarian insults and attitudes towards each other.

So the study is basically about risk. What is the risk? How does the experience of being in that environment influence you in terms of becoming a perpetuator who engages in that type of violence or antisocial behaviour, a witness to that type of behaviour or a victim of it. What does that mean? How does that impact on your life? We are looking at all these multiple processes. They very much overlap with one another, in terms of how families live in those communities, and clearly there is interest in studying families in which the parents are mostly pre-ceasefire and the children post-ceasefire, so you have two different sets of lifestyles which have been influenced, and that has an impact on how families function and work together.

So we are looking at relationships within families and communities, relationships between communities, and interpersonal relationships within families, and at what protects people from those issues. There are actually ways in which people are very much protected within their community from those types of issues. We also look at the positive things that come out of these communities with regard to those issues. It helps us understand how sectarianism is being reproduced in communities, and it also gives us a good guide as to whether there will be a long-term stabilisation of the peace process.

This was based on three phases. There were focus groups, and then there was the measure of these issues. Then, over six years, we followed 700 mothers and their children in these interface communities. Some of these children are now parents. When we started off, they were 14 or 15, and they are now in their early 20s. Some of these people are now 16,17 and 18. We did not get 700 families each year — it went down to about 550 — but, over the six-year period, we have a very sizable database that tells us about the experiences of people's lives living in these 24 segregated communities throughout the period 2006-2012.

Four research findings came out of this very strongly, which I think are relevant to the youth strategy in T:BUC and how they should be factored in. I think that that picks up on some of the points that were made earlier about what it is that we are trying to tackle and how we are going to tackle it. The first is measuring emotional security. That is measured in two ways: first, how emotionally secure you feel that you are in your family and, secondly, how emotionally secure you feel in your community. If you live in a family in which there is a high level of support, if there is a lot of good functioning in the family, if you feel that you are part of your community and interact with it and if you feel that you have a role in your community, that basically protects you from sectarian behaviour. You will experience sectarian behaviour, but you will not be affected by mental health problems and aggression. That is very important.

The first thing that we are doing here is that we are not pathologising communities. We are showing that there are differences and that factors like the family influence people's attitudes and behaviours. Among families where that is not the case and where there is much more fracture in the family and you do not feel part of the community, sectarian violence and antisocial behaviour create traumas, depressions and anxiety amongst young people. One of the things that is really important to understand here is that family structure, if it is supportive, buffers you from these factors. If you do not have strong family support, you are very negatively affected by what happens around you in terms of trauma, difficulty and other such things. There is quite clearly a policy outcome here, which is to identify ways to increase emotional security in the family and the community despite experiencing ongoing conditions. Hopefully, everybody understands that. Emotional security in the family and emotional security in your community protects you from sectarian experiences. If you do not have that and it is the other way in your family and your community, it affects you very badly and you will adopt mental health problems, anxieties and stresses.

The second finding is on social identity. This is based on how you much you identify with the label Catholic/nationalist/republican or Protestant/unionist/loyalist. What we find here works out as both a benefit and a burden. The more that you sense that you are one of those two groups and have a really strong sense of identity within those groups, it is a protective buffer. If you feel that you are really Protestant or really Catholic, you do not really have any maladaptive influences because of sectarian violence etc. However, if you also have a strong identity, you are much more likely to be involved in sectarian out-group behaviour. If identity is strong, you are more likely to be involved in something like interface violence, rioting or other types of behaviour. There is a very strong issue here about the strength of identity. Identity buffers you and makes you feel part of a community, but it also makes you outplay your actions against the other community. If your identity is weaker, you are more likely not to be involved in sectarian behaviour and sectarian practices. There is a very strong finding on that.

There is another policy outcome for T:BUC. Social identity works in good and bad ways, so integrationists needs to take account of that. One of the questions that we really have to look at here is maybe a bigger question in T:BUC: what is the value of single-identity work? There is a very strong relationship. That also came out in the work that we did on the flag protests recently, and you see that in life and times surveys. People who have very negative attitudes tend to have much stronger senses of identity.

The third finding is about family cohesion, which is not the same as emotional security. How cohesive your family is and how you feel within the family also buffers children from developing aggression and lessens the amount that you will be sectarian against the other community. If your family is very cohesive, not just emotionally but in that there is work and you are attending school and you understand your family as a good, strong dynamic, that makes children less sectarian. You can see from the first and the third finding that the strengthening of family is very important in any policies that we have, and, if families support each other, this seems to decrease overall adolescent aggression and also reduces the impact that you will involve in other groups. I assume that, in layperson terms, we are talking about your parents not letting you go out in the street when there are riots. If your family are keeping you in some sort of order, that has a big impact. Poverty and all of these factors are big players in family cohesion.

The final research finding is quite interesting. If you do not feel part of your group, you are much more likely to engage in cross-community activity. If you have been beaten up or assaulted by people in your own community or if there is aggression towards you in your own community, that makes you much more likely to want to engage in cross-community activity. I do not know how we deal with in terms of policy, but youths who experience in-group antisocial activity are more likely to help or be positive about the out group. These are all important things to find, and we are finding that improving attitudes about the other group over time does increase helping pro-social acts or behaviours between the two communities.

To finish off, the root of those findings is still related to poverty, income in the home, how well the children perform at school and all of those positive factors. The higher that those positive factors are, generally, the less sectarian a young person will be, with the exception of if they have a really strong sense of identity and are functioning solely in their own community, and that is reinforcing prejudice towards the other issues.

Very quickly, I will go through with regard to T:BUC. I understand the overarching principles, and I agree with what Brandon has said. What is it that we are trying to change? If we are going to challenge sectarianism, what is it? What is sectarianism? What is racism? What is prejudice? I am not sure that we really have proper working definitions of what we are trying to change. What are these things? How do we account for them? If you are trying to change something or challenge something, you need to have a definitional basis on which to challenge that. I think that that is one of the things that is very important. As I have said before, in sustaining peace, maybe with the youth programme and T:BUC, if we have this evidence and you agree with it, should we not be doing more at the site of the family? Should we not be working at that site? So youths should not be sectioned away from their families; youth and the relationship with the family seems to be very important in how people behave and their attitudes and how they cope in their societies.

On shaping policy, this obviously needs joined-up government. If we go down that route of looking at family, we can show that, in families where there are mental health problems amongst the parents, some of it being trauma-related from the past, that is being reproduced. Clearly, there is a need for joined-up government where we are working with these issues. Quite clearly, we need to stimulate participation. The people who lead this, quite clearly, have to be able to get people to participate, and Brandon made that point. Finally, the whole delivery of this has to be something that has much sharper aims and objectives. It has to be something that we can evaluate, and hopefully the research that we have done will be a basis for maybe designing some of the youth activities. It might be a way that you can have a measure to look at what success actually is through the T:BUC programme.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Peter, thank you very much indeed. Brandon, I will go back to the very start and talk about processes and journeys. I have a two-part question. First, how would you define the difference between this as a process and this as a journey?

Professor Hamber: I think that I was saying the opposite. I was saying that the idea of a journey could be seen as analogous to the idea of a process, rather than as something separate.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): So it is a journey that would have a destination, potentially.

Professor Hamber: I think that what I was arguing for is that you could set a series of destination goals, but all of those will have to be incremental in how you get to those. I do not need to tell you all that you cannot change that overnight, so you have to set a series of stages and steps for where you might go. My observation of the document is that it is not very strong in outlining that direction. The principle of it being a process that is leading somewhere is mentioned, but it is not really followed in the text, broadly speaking.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): A common criticism of government here is that we are process- and input-driven and do not have enough focus on the outputs, and particularly the outcomes. You say, "Our vision is we are here, and this is where we want to be", and then you build the bridge, the road or whatever analogy you want to put in to get to that endpoint. How well does T:BUC do in that regard?

Professor Hamber: I was trying to articulate that there is quite a strong vision articulated in terms of the type of society that the document envisages, but there is not a very clear sense of how you get from A to B. It talks about very high-level and serious problems — it routinely uses the words, "segregation", "separation" and "violence" — but the steps that it outlines to deal with those types of macro social problems are not that well articulated.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Why would that be? There are yourselves and any number of experts within your field, the voluntary and community sector, communities and families who would be more than willing to input.

Professor Hamber: Would you like me to respond again?

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Yes. For example, what input did you have before T:BUC was published?

Professor Hamber: At a personal level, I engaged in a range of different discussions. I did not make a submission —

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Sorry, Brandon.

Professor Hamber: In terms of your question about why there is a vision but it is not quite clear how we get to that vision, I did not really have time to articulate this in my paper. Arguably there are different ideas of what some of those words mean. That goes back to Pete's point about what sectarianism is. What does "separation" or "segregation" mean? What does "shared" actually mean? If you look across the different political parties, there is often a different vision of what that means.

In theory, there is an author called Louis Kriesberg, and he talks about thin and thick reconciliation. By that, he means that for some people the notion of reconciliation essentially involves there being no violence and then saying "You walk down one side of the street, I will walk down the other. We will respect who we are, and that is fine." Then there is a thicker notion of reconciliation, which involves social, cultural and community integration. When you read through this document and its predecessors, there seems to be a battle over whether people hold a thick version of the future in terms of reconciliation or a thin version. That continually knocks on into the CSI document. You see that debate all the way through the documents.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): That is a strong point: there is not a shared definition of some of these concepts. We have two issues, therefore: the end goal — the vision — is open to interpretation, and the route map for how we get there is not clear. How do you fix those two fundamental problems?

Professor Hamber: Do you want me to answer how we fix the problems?

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): It is not a free lunch.

Professor Hamber: I will make a stab at it if you want.

Professor Shirlow: You have to have definitional robustness. If you are going to design anything, you have to have that. I teach students, so I need to have a curriculum: I need to have something that defines exactly what I am going to deliver to my students. The way we have skirted around with these terms has been part of the problem. There are probably very strong ideological difference over what those terms mean.

The way we did it in our project was to ask the families who participated what they thought the definition was. Going back to your original point, there are people who could come up with a relatively workable definition of these issues. If you do not have definitional robustness, I do not understand what you are going to change. It does not matter whether it is thick or thin; it matters in terms of what you would expect to be an evaluation.

At the end of T:BUC, what would you measure as success? It is easy for us as academics: you deliver the policies and programmes, and we sit on the sidelines and judge them in hindsight. However, if I were designing a piece of research — I am sure that Brandon is the same — I would start with the outcomes that I am looking for. I would ask myself where the strategy will take me to and what the outcome will be. Sometimes, we work the other way around and saying, "Let's set something up that might take us to those outcomes". This will be a bumpy train, and you are perhaps not going to deliver the outcomes that you have set, but I am not really sure what those outcomes are, and we are certainly not sure what the definitions are. Without that foundation, everything slides.

One thing that we have not done in this society is to promote the idea of conflict transformation. Some communities and individuals are afraid of that type of peacemaking. The whole spirit of conflict transformation is that you do not have to change your identity. We have been very bad at selling the idea of reconciliation not being threatening. It is about how you practise your identity, and we see that in the survey work that we did. Some people practise their identity very well. They maintain a certain sense of their community identity and engage in intercommunity activity. Without being egotistical, I would say that the research that we have here is the sort of evidence that you need to know how to tackle the problem. Hopefully, what I have presented today might be novel to people or not something that they have thought about.

It is about having that connection between researchers and politicians, and you have evidence here that shows that the issues are not simply orange and green. They are influenced by family, poverty and dysfunction. Those are important stepping stones that we have to have.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): OK, but do we have to have a homogeneous definition of those things, or is it valid to say that, because, in area a, the thin definition of reconciliation is perfectly acceptable because it works, and, in area b, the thick definition is possible and works, we should live with that?

Professor Shirlow: Neither will work unless you take away the heat. Unless you take away sectarian violence and sectarian antisocial behaviour, nothing will work. It goes back to challenging the problem. What is the problem that you are trying to challenge?

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): But thick and thin work.

Professor Shirlow: Thick and thin reconciliation will evolve if we change the nature of what people have to experience in their communities. It goes back to what you are trying to design. If we have significant decline in sectarian behaviour and practices, that surely will have an influence that may then take us on the journey to thick or thin. If we have people who are still being marginalised and attacked and who feel that their community is being assaulted, we will not go anywhere.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): No, but I heard Brandon say — what I assume he is saying — that you can have a situation in which you have got away from sectarianism. If it is thin reconciliation, you have people walking up and down different sides of the street and not really engaging, but if it is thick reconciliation, they engage. If you can achieve either, depending on what suits a local community, is that acceptable?

Professor Hamber: What I was saying is that you might have got away from active and direct forms of violence. That does not mean, depending on your definition, that you have got away from sectarianism. If you define sectarianism, as the document does, as being a direct threat or direct forms of violence, you can say, yes, we have got away from sectarianism.

If you define sectarianism differently, in terms of the types of attitudes or views that you hold being damaging to or negative about another community, you might have got away from violence, but you have not got away from sectarianism. We could debate for a long time whether that is the correct definition, but it illustrates the point about it depending on how you define the problem that you are dealing with.

Underneath that is what your theory of change is. How do you see the change happening? The document oscillates between three theories of change, broadly speaking. One is attitudinal change, in that, if people change their mindset and the way in which they think about things, there starts to be changes in society. In other places, it is like a behavioural notion of change. Therefore, if we make communities safer, police better and prevent people from acting in ways, things will start to change. Other parts of the document seem to imply the idea of structural, contradictory change. Therefore, if we start to change poverty and people's access to resources, things will start to change.

What we know is that it has to be all three of those simultaneously. However, I think that at different points, and for different reasons, people will buy into different parts of that model rather than try to buy into all of it. It is not that your task is easy. Trying to move from the society that we have been in is an incredibly complex process.

Professor Shirlow: The thing about our study and other work that I have done is that some young people engage in sectarian behaviour and do not really know the history of why they do that or why the communities are divided. They do not really have a vocabulary. It is simply about venting at other problems in their life. We saw that with the flag protest. I do not know this completely, but there was some sort of evidence that a lot of the young people involved had special needs, and other kids who were spoken to at the time were venting about other, wider problems in their life, such as poverty, break-up in the family or violence at home. Those were factors in their life that were making them behave in a certain way and choose a target. They think, "Because I live in this community, the target is over there", without actually knowing what the target is and why they are doing what they are doing. Therefore, there is a practical problem as well. You have to look at what the actions are and why they happen.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): I am just trying to tease this out. If, as an Assembly and an Executive, we set a vision, and that vision is open to interpretation, is it necessarily a bad thing if the various interpretations to some extent represent positive progress, possibly not the end of the journey but a good step forward? Should we not embrace that and recognise that it is not a homogeneous society and that some areas will be more open and ready to take a step than others? That takes me to the other point, which is the question of who is in charge, because it seems to me that we can set a direction of travel, publish a very detailed route map and effectively impose that, or we can recognise that there are so many different players here, such as government, you, families, communities, the voluntary and community sector, and the statutory bodies. If it were an orchestra, and once you say, "This is the tune that we are going to play", who should have the baton? Should it be passed around? Who drives this?

Professor Shirlow: Once again, it is about what you expect the outcome to be. To me, an outcome would be a significant reduction in sectarian violence and antisocial behaviour. Therefore, if we were to implement an evidential basis, and we set up a programme of activities that did that, that would be progress, because it comes out of what Brandon was saying and what I have been trying to say, which is that that change in relationships could affect something else. Of course, a lot of it will be going into the unknown, but we did not know what the National Health Service would be like until we set it up. We did not know what its impact would be. However, setting up the National Health Service was the right thing to do despite opposition at the time. As legislators, there are things that you can do, and if those things are designed properly, we can have a successful outcome in that sense. As I said earlier, I do not think that any of us is against people having their identity. The point is that we want people to practise their identity in ways that are not based on intimidating the other community and harming themselves. A great deal of sectarian practice also harms you.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): My question is around designing it properly. How do you do that? The key question within that is this: who does it? Is it done up here by officials, or do you devolve that power and accept that there may be solutions that, at a local level, will be significantly different from area to area?

Professor Shirlow: Say, for example, that you do it through T:BUC and have actors who then engage in delivering that. The issue there is having the right people to do that. You need people who are able to drive community participation, people who are trained in understanding good citizenship and people who are trained in tackling the issues. I cannot speak for Brandon, but I think that T:BUC somehow throws up many more issues than it resolves, because, in some ways, we are still at an infancy stage in understanding what we are trying to change. We know what the blunt end of it is, but, without agreement on what the problem is, we are not necessarily sure about what we are trying to change.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): You are talking about people who are properly or relevantly trained, yet two of your four conclusions are about the importance of the family.

Professor Shirlow: Yes. We have all sorts of governmental interventions for families in distress. What we say from our research project is that joined-up government should be coping with those issues. The young lad who involves himself in a sectarian practice will be dealt with by the police or the criminal justice system, but the family may well also be being dealt with by social services. Are those joined up?

Mrs Hale: This has been very interesting today, so thank you very much. My question is for Professor Hamber. You mentioned a term that really caught my attention: a negative peace. Can you explain that and give an example? What are the long-term consequences of a negative or empty peace? That speaks to me as something that is brittle and hollow and that lacks content. Obviously, T:BUC is designed to get to the root of the communities that are experiencing division.

Professor Hamber: I did not bring a formal definition of "negative peace", but, broadly speaking, the idea of a negative peace is that there has potentially been a decrease in direct forms of violence but a lot of the underlying causes of the conflict, whether inequality, separation or attitudinal or behavioural issues, remain in place. You might have a situation that looks peaceful on the outside, but, underneath, a lot of the structural issues remain. The most recent peace monitoring report, or the one before it, talked about the idea of community shocks, so if there is an event that takes place, such as we saw with the flag protest or whatever, and a lot of the underlying issues are not addressed, those can resurface quite quickly. There are numerous global examples of that. Some people argue, for example, that somewhere such as Cyprus could be considered to be a situation of negative peace, where no direct forms of violence are going on, but nothing is going anywhere very fast. You will hear people use that term about Northern Ireland, despite some of the progress that has been made. The essential point is about failing to address the underlying issues that are causing the conflict. The challenge, of course, is the debate about what those are. That is the bigger debate that we have been having. How do we agree what those are?

Mrs Hale: Do you feel that, if there is a negative peace, we run the risk of fomenting the situation and having other disenfranchised communities join in sectarianism? We have perhaps seen that with racism and other stuff joining underneath that, and the situation is exploited.

Professor Hamber: Yes, that is the logical conclusion.

Mr Maskey: Thank you, Pete and Professor Hamber. This has been a very interesting discussion so far. Your expertise being brought to bear and the amount of research underlines the fact that you have not really yet got the answer or asked the right questions. What are we trying to resolve? I do think that we moved into a period of negative peace. Indeed, we were dangerously in a process of negative peace. The peace process should be positive. It should be about moving forward, but it was in danger of going backwards. Although we had a peace process and an end, more or less, to the vast bulk of street conflict, we were having a battle politically, which was potentially unravelling all the progress that we had made over the past number of years.

Like a lot of other people around the table, as a representative I have been involved in giving out funding amounting to millions of pounds to projects across different communities for tackling disadvantage, including tackling disadvantage as a mechanism for communities to work together, and for single identity work, where people could try to build their self-confidence, if that is what they identified themselves as lacking before they could engage with others. We put on the table projects that asked the hard questions about what makes us different and why we are fighting over matters. I could not say, hand on heart, that all that money was wonderfully well spent, but it was a very important process to have been involved in. I am talking primarily about European Peace money a number of years ago. A lot of work and funding is continuing to this day. I am not sure that we are honest enough to ask the right questions of ourselves. You can talk in terms of communities, as Brenda did, that are divided. Sometimes, I think that people tend to talk about the problem being "all over there". It is all somewhere else and not within me or us, dare I say that. When people use the terminology the "two tribes", I am probably defined as being part of one tribe, but I find that offensive. As a fan of native American Indians, I hear people talk about "tribes", and I am not against that, but it is a pejorative term and is very condescending, actually.

We need to do something different. I do not like it when people talk about the two tribes or when people define your politics as sectarian. I would like to think that I am not sectarian. I certainly do not want to be sectarian, but a lot of people outside my community probably say, "Well, you are one of the sectarian politicians". We do not have agreement on that.

During the flag protests, not every person who went through the courts was a young person who was disadvantaged or came from a broken family. When you read the court transcripts, a lot were of an age — in their 30s, 40s or 50s — and working. Most were looking for bail because they did not want to lose their job. It does not always stack up to have just a cadre over there who are really struggling, are from a broken family or have difficulties. There are correlations, as you well know. You are academics, and I am not, and you know that there are correlations between poverty, disadvantage and other forms of breakdown. If there is a broken-down or disadvantaged community, there will be problems that will manifest themselves in some way. If you go to Birmingham, Dublin or Limerick, and if there is disadvantage, and corruption is allowed, problems will manifest themselves in one way or another. We just happen to have the political platform here. People can get involved as a result or exploit the situation and become sectarian and abusive on the streets.

I am quite firm in my own mind. Sometimes we look at the problem as being the fact that we have peace walls. We also have velvet curtains. We are all political party representatives. We all canvass at hundreds and thousands of doors. When I canvass, I find that people are quite honest, especially the longer that they know you, even people who would never vote for you. I find that people are quite good at being honest, which I appreciate. People are also firm in their views. That does make them wrong or sectarian, but they are firm in their views. Or perhaps they are sectarian, and that is why we need firm laws to make sure that people do not translate that into abusing people because they are different from them and act out what I would call sectarianism, which is discriminating against somebody.

It is difficult, Chair, because it is a multilayered problem that we are trying to deal with. For me, the Good Friday Agreement process was important, because that said for the first time that you are entitled to be different and to have a different view. What we now need to do as a society is learn to respect that.

Over the years, I have had people from the velvet curtain side of the community say to me, "What more do you want? You got the Good Friday Agreement". I reply that all that I want is to see it implemented. It is about equality and about allowing us all to speak our mind without being slapped down every time that we want to say something that is not conventional.

T:BUC is another process that, in due course, people will write off or say that it was a good job or that a good effort was made with it. I do not think that it can be as successful as we would all like to think, because it goes back to this point: how do you define what we are really looking for? Would we measure a positive outcome as people saying, "I totally respect your right to say what you have said"?

Ms McGahan: Thank you for your presentation. Brandon, I want to pick up on a comment that you made about contact programmes. You referred to them as sometimes being a sticking plaster. In my constituency of Fermanagh and South Tyrone — I represent in particular the south Tyrone area — the contact programme has resulted in agreement between two communities for a shared educational campus, which I am sure you have heard tell of, for Moy Regional Primary School and St John's Primary School. Would you acknowledge that that is a successful and significant outcome from the contact programmes?

Professor Hamber: Certainly. There are contact programmes and there are contact programmes. What we know from a theoretical perspective is that contact works between communities and individuals under certain conditions. It works best when people feel that they have an equal level of status in their contact. It works best when people feel that they have some sense of identity with the groups that are in contact with each another. It has also been found that it generally works best when people are working on larger problems. Therefore, instead of coming into the room to talk about their differences, they are engaging in something actively.

Finally, the research suggests that contact needs to be sustained over a long period. The idea of once-off contact or weekend engagements does not necessarily always show as positive results for contact. I do not know the full details of the programme, although I know of it. My guess is that it meets those four types of conditions, so that example may well be one of a very successful form of contact.

However, there are other examples of community-based programmes that do not meet those four types of conditions, and we are investing in those programmes but not getting the types of outcomes we seek. The bigger question for me is this: as a Government, what is the best way of doing them? Do we want to scale up those types of initiatives, or are we saying, "That's a massive investment, which has been successful, using a certain type of approach", when there are other places in which we could foster contact, such as our recreational facilities and our schools, more naturally? That, for me, is the bigger question, rather than the success or weakness of the project.

Professor Shirlow: One of the things that we found in our research was that the young people who took part in intercommunity activities came from homes that were much more secure. One of the problems was that the kids who were engaged in sectarian violence or sectarian antisocial behaviour were not participating in community activities. Therefore, what you had was contact between children from both communities who were not particularly sectarian or were from families that were more open to that type of interaction. Those whom you found outside of that were the kids from the more maladaptive situations, who were not participating in anything. That goes back to the structure of the family, where the family is saying, "You should take part in this intercommunity scheme. You should engage".

It seems to me that those in that "out" group — those who do not engage — are usually picked up in things such as restorative justice schemes, when we have got to a stage at which we are dealing directly with the problem. That can be very important as well. Sorry, this all complicates what T:BUC is trying to achieve, but there is another layer there of trying to recognise who is participating in the positive interaction programmes between communities and who is not. Finding out who is not is probably very important as well.

T:BUC could try to engage with those types of hard-to-reach communities. We know what happens with young males especially: when they get to a certain age, they take to a bottle of cider and are not interested in such activities, because they are too soft, not fun, and so on. As part of that process, they go back on the street, behave in other antisocial ways and engage in sectarian activity or violence, or both. There is a very strong link between being sectarian and being involved in non-sectarian crime. The hard to reach are very important in those contacts and interactions.

Ms McGahan: Is there a difference between urban and rural areas in building a united and shared community?

Professor Shirlow: There is most certainly anecdotal evidence that, in the cities, the relationships are a bit more reproduced and a bit harder. There is a cheek-by-jowl analysis: in the rural areas, because people are not necessarily living 6 feet or 2 metres away, the context can be slightly different. From the research that I have done in the past, rural youth tend may have very strong opinions, but they do not tend to act them out in the same sort of way; namely, through antisocial behaviour or violence.

Professor Hamber: Broadly speaking, there is significantly less focus on rural communities than there is on urban communities. You might say that more people live in urban areas, but, in academia and a whole range of other fields, there seems to be a lot less focus on rural areas. Pete has done some work on that, but it is looked at less.

Ms Fearon: Thanks very much. This has been so interesting, and we have all enjoyed it.

I wish to focus on another disenfranchised group across all communities. Women were largely excluded from the peace process, and they still are to a large extent. You just have to look around this place for proof of that. I know that we are a post-conflict society, and I heard Brandon say earlier that it looks peaceful from the outside and that there is less violence, but, to date, we have never acknowledged the differential impact that the conflict had on women and men. We have some of the highest levels of domestic violence, and you cannot get away from the fact that that links to dependency on alcohol and to mental health issues. It would be interesting to hear your opinion on how T:BUC addresses, or does not address, that. There is a feeling out there that there is an almost tokenistic reference to women in the strategy. The gender equality strategy is mentioned once or twice, but that is it. To date, we have not acknowledged the impact that the conflict had on women. How do we resolve such issues?

Professor Shirlow: It is very clear that, in the traditional structure of our society, women are central to picking up the pieces, such as through providing emotional security and family cohesion. There is a domesticated role in that sense. Women tend to be there when the problems happen in the family, and they are there in the more supportive roles as well. One of the things that we found very strongly was that females — young females as well as mothers — were more likely to try to turn people away from sectarianism and violence. They saw that as — this reproduces what you are talking about — a very domesticated and subservient role: that they were there to pick up the pieces or to try to prevent certain aggressions and behaviours. What also comes out of the research that we did is that, if the mother is not living in higher levels of poverty, and so on, that will also influence her ability to cope with dysfunctionalism or maladaptive behaviours in the family.

Professor Hamber: I echo some of those comments. You made the point yourself, and I do not think that the T:BUC strategy has a gendered focus at all. I was surprised when you said that it was mentioned. I read it again early this morning, and the mention of the gender equality strategy did not even stick in my head. To my mind, there was no mention of a gendered analysis, but I may be wrong.

There are two points to make. The first is that this often links to some of the definitional issues, such as how we define "sectarianism" or define the problem. There is a tendency in societies in conflict to define the problem in terms of what is the most visible, which is often direct forms of political violence, such as attacks in some shape or form. We know that men are generally more involved in that. If we turn our gaze towards only the behavioural component of trying to deal with problems, we tend to focus overly on young men and their behavioural problems. In doing that, we miss a whole lot of other dynamics that exist in the community, such as underlying issues of poverty that affect women differently. Their role in the conflict might look different. It is a massive gap.

At a more practical level that the Committee could look at, there is a lot of mention of different strategies and activities in the document that are completely gender-blind. For example, it talks routinely about sport. It would be very curious to ask people whom they think that the sport element is aimed at. I would not want to prejudge that. Perhaps it was thought of in a very gender-sensitive way, but I do not really know. However, if you fail to mention that point when making that sort of analysis, there is every chance that the types of programmes that have been advocated are going to be skewed in completely different directions.

Professor Shirlow: In the type of work that we did, the majority of young people who experienced sectarian violence or antisocial behaviour were males, but the point that we are showing in this work is that it goes back into the home. Whether you are a 16-year-old girl or boy, the environment is the same, because those issues are brought back into the home. How they are dealt with, and the crisis and anger that that creates in the home, will obviously influence how people respond.

Ms Fearon: We are going to be hearing from different women's groups. Hopefully, we will be able to influence or feed in their feelings, because T:BUC is gender-blind, as you said. There are so many issues that affect women as a result of what we have been through as a society that just get completely forgotten.

Professor Hamber: It is gender-blind in the failure to mention not only women but the relationship between femininity and masculinity in the types of violence that we see. A more sophisticated analysis could be done of the way in which violence plays itself out once you attach a gendered approach to it.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Brandon, upstairs earlier this afternoon, there was a presentation by one of your colleagues, Dr Catherine O'Rourke, on the impact of the conflict and the role of women.

Mr Lyttle: Thanks for your presentation. If possible, I would be keen to get a copy of the Northern Ireland Project research. It sounds interesting. What priority do you think OFMDFM gives to addressing sectarianism and segregation?

Professor Hamber: That is a good question. Wearing my academic hat, I am always tempted to say that I do not have the evidence to say that I know exactly the hours that are given to different topics and policy approaches on different issues. I can answer this only anecdotally. I do not want to belittle the importance of job creation and other issues. However, there is a much higher level of media profile around the types of engagement that OFMDFM and others do on those issues than maybe some of the others. As I said, I feel nervous in saying that because I cannot completely evidence it, but there certainly do not seem to be as many announcements. I know that there were several announcements about T:BUC and others and about the youth strategy and so on and so forth, but, as a regular citizen sitting on the outside, one certainly sees more announcements about a range of other approaches than about issues like sectarianism, social division and segregation. Again, I am happy to be proved wrong.

Professor Shirlow: OFMDFM has played a role in the research it has commissioned. There is a series of pieces of research commissioned that show us exactly what the problem is. For example, there is the work that we did in Derry/Londonderry about the Protestant community and how it felt alienated, which has helped to build better relationships in that city. I am sure that you, Brandon, have done work for OFMDFM. The last phase of this family study is a qualitative exercise, and that is being partly sponsored by OFMDFM. There is a big body of work sitting there.

I think that one of the problems we still have in this society is how we merge evidence with political practice. If we were sitting here talking about how many tons of iron ore we created or how many litres of milk were produced last year, probably nobody in this room would disagree with us. This is very much about how we build much stronger links between politicians and academic evidence, not because we are sitting here saying that we are somehow superior and that we know these things. Certainly, there is an evidential base that may help in that way, but I think that we do not hear enough from politicians about the difficulty in putting these things into their communities.

When Alex talks about knocking on the doors, etc, and hearing things such as, "There's you talking to that so-and-so who did such-and-such", then that type of partisan, street-based anger is still very much there. It is about how we try to merge evidence with your experiences, and we do not really have that in some ways. To an extent, we work in a silo and you work in a silo regarding evidence-bases and political activities. I would be surprised if the OFMDFM research were known by all MLAs. Are they aware of the research that has been done? Maybe that is an issue. How we merge this is very important.

Clearly, one of the other problems is that in community and politics, as citizens — or subjects, to use the proper title for us in the UK — we are all part of the process of the transformation of this society. I am not saying that because I am sitting in front of politicians, but, sometimes, it can be too easy to blame them for many of the problems we have in our society. I think that a lot of this has to be about the spirit of wanting society to move forward. Whether you want to stay in the UK or want a united Ireland, what is your responsibility in the transformation of this society? Maybe this is a Utopia, but how we effect this much more strongly in society is very important. Despite the fact that we have a negative peace, and whatever else, I think that this is a much better society. Any of us who have children are certainly living in a much better society than we once did. Maybe the Assembly does not celebrate that enough. Some of the shocks that we have been through in the last few years would have been much worse 20 or 30 years ago.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Peter, when you are commissioned to do research, do you know whether it will be published? If it is to be published, do you follow through to make sure that it is published?

Professor Shirlow: You would not get research funding unless you said that you were going to publish, so you have to publish as part of the conditions of the research.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): So, they would never commission private research from you.

Professor Shirlow: OFMDFM?

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Yes.

Professor Shirlow: Not that I have experienced.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): So, it is all published.

Professor Shirlow: There is a lot of material there that has been very important material.

Professor Hamber: T:BUC references a number of those documents, the life and times survey and others.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Does either university ever survey elected representatives to see to what extent these reports are read, studied and acknowledged?

Professor Shirlow: Probably not, but I think that there is an increasing number of studies that are engaging with political actors about how they feel about peace, change and the Assembly. I think that that has taken place.

Mr Lyttle: I have one other line of questioning. Dealing with past atrocities and transitional justice are important aspects of building a united community, and I know that you have both worked on those areas. What is your assessment of some of the proposals from the Stormont House Agreement in that context? I think in particular of the online archive that you have worked on.

Professor Shirlow: Clearly, the landscape is a mess when you consider that we have the whole landscape of victims, including the HET, public inquiries that put the state in the dock — to use that terminology for short hand — the decommissioning of weapons, which makes it difficult to collect forensic evidence and royal prerogatives of mercy. I could go on and on and on.

Quite clearly, the response to the victims issue is highly fractured. Obviously, it is constructed around contention. I do not know enough about it, and I do not know what the collection of information is meant to achieve, because I do not think that you could ever have a timeline of the Troubles or the conflict that everybody would agree to. It is too theoretical and ideological to produce that.

I still think that, in politicising the conflict in our society, the one thing we missed out on was care for the people who were harmed. I think that the harm caused in this society is colour-blind if we talk about orange and green or others in society. That is the thing that we have missed. We should have been building a society around coping and caring. Much of this is reflected by the fact that many of these families, who are producing kids who behave in this way, are very traumatised by the past.

We should have based our whole process on trauma recovery and harm intervention. That can come in many forms, including psychological help, stress relief and even just recognition. We should have become more focused on servicing the needs of victims and people who were harmed in the conflict as opposed to the fractured landscape that we have, which seems to be that one political section gets this and the other political section gets that. That really takes us nowhere.

I have observed this: when politicians have been on the television arguing about the past, people have rung me up, or I have had people who I have been doing research with, saying, "I sat last night and cried because, when they are sitting shouting at each other, it just brings it all back to me". What the person needs is not that. It is about how we take the political and ideological aspects out of the issue. I think that this is the only way that you can progress this society. You can still have your ideological differences about what the conflict was about and about whether there was collusion or whatever the issue is that you want to discuss, but this has to be a human-centred process, which is about giving people the capacity to cope in a changing society that then does not transmit itself. As shown in our study, in the case of people who lost loved ones, that is being transmitted to their children.

Professor Hamber: From my perspective, not only is there a challenging landscape with respect to dealing with past strategies more widely, which Pete outlined, but there are disparities between the documents now. Obviously, the documents come out at different moments in time. How, for example, does the suggestion about the education programmes advocated in T:BUC interface with the oral history work and other narrative work that the Stormont House Agreement talks about? There is work that needs to be done to knit some of these issues together.

You specifically asked me about what we have done in relation to the oral history work. At INCORE at the Ulster University, we have developed a resource called Accounts of the Conflict, where we have been working with a range of different community groups that have been collecting stories of the conflict. There are well over 30 groups that have been doing that, and we have been recreating an online collection of collections of stories. The infrastructure for this type of an archive has been created at interfaces with the CAIN archive that we run, which is the largest digital repository of information about the conflict anywhere in the world. We feel that, on that specific recommendation, we have done a lot of the groundwork, and we would welcome interfacing with the appropriate body in relation to how the Stormont House Agreement will be timetabled and moved forward.

I think that the challenge with that specific recommendation is the same one that we have alluded to the whole way through here, which is that people have certain perspectives. It is unlikely that we will be able to change those and find a common perspective in the short term. So, what can we do so that people can get a better sense of one another's experiences and narratives in a safe and accessible way? If done right, something like the oral history archive and the work we have done at least starts to move down that road. At least you have somewhere where you can start to see a whole range of different experiences which, hopefully, could contribute to the more human view that Pete was advocating.

Mr D McIlveen: Thank you for your presentation, gentlemen. Obviously, it has been pretty much 20 years since the ceasefires, so, if anybody who — put it this way — is at or below the higher and further education age alleges themselves to be a victim of the Troubles, they are an inherited victim, rather than having suffered direct experience. It is implied, from some of your presentation, that there has been a degree of passing victimhood on to the next generation, which is obviously something that will be quite damaging for us in the future and something we need to deal with.

In that context, how has your research developed in looking at us as being exclusive, in our problems? Bear in mind that, if we broaden this out, even to our next-door neighbours or the rest of the United Kingdom, then there are huge antisocial behaviour problems in housing estates and working-class areas in England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. I suppose that our society has not moved on to the extent that it is an issue of black and white, Muslim and Christian or "They are getting everything that we are not, because of their religion". For us, it is more the case that we have remained in our traditional tribes, if I can put it that way. How exclusive are we, as regards 21st-century antisocial behaviour in working-class areas? What is it about our situation that is different to what appears to be happening throughout the rest of the United Kingdom?

Professor Shirlow: We are still, pretty much, a low-crime society compared with others. That is an issue. Of course, all such crime is reported crime, so we can see only the tip of the iceberg. We know that for every crime that is reported, six or seven similar crimes go unreported. We certainly do not have the same drug-related violence, from what I can gather. With the exception of some wards, we do not have the same volume of violence or reported crime that you would have in some other, similarly deprived communities. So, that is important.

One of the things that is really important to understand is that the work that was done in places like Lebanon and maybe South Africa etc shows that a lot of the trauma and the maladaptive behaviours come significantly after conflict ends. You see that with war veterans. When you are involved in a conflict, you have very strong coping strategies, so you have a strong bond with your community. That is what we are up against: the Second World War attitude that we are all in it together. There is very strong community solidarity, to an extent. You also have a reason for that identity, because you are protecting yourself: "I do not want to be harmed, or I do not want to be a victim of that". Quite clearly, when a conflict ends, those bonds tend to break down, especially over time. The way in which violence brings a community together begins to fracture.

The same thing takes place when you take away a factory, as we saw in places such as Dublin or Manchester. With de-industrialisation, community purpose leaves, and there is a growth in drugs, crime and all those things. However, there is very strong evidence that this is happening in other post-conflict societies. When you think that the conflict is over, it actually comes back. That is a part of the ageing process. People of our generation have been through the Troubles. As you get older, you reflect more on your life: "Did I achieve things?". This is when these issues, these episodes in, say, 1972, 1973 or 1974, these things that you and I may have experienced — I am sorry, I do not know what age you are, so I will say things that I may have experienced — come back as you start to reflect on your life, and they can cause traumas because of other things in your life. As you get older, you are maybe more stressed. That is important.

Mike Tomlinson's work at Queens was really important. He made a very strong argument regarding suicide in society. Obviously, suicide is a very unfortunate feature of our society. He made the comparison with the suicide rates of our neighbours — the Republic, Wales, Scotland, and England. Their rates have gone down because of better treatment and, to go back to masculinity, because men now talk about things that at one time they would not have talked about etc. Obviously, there is better recording as well. Those suicide rates have gone down, but Mike Tomlinson has shown that our rates have increased, especially among the section of our society who were young adults during the conflict. There are very strong lag effects that will come back at a certain point. It is like the question: "What is the impact of the French Revolution? It is too early to say". What is the impact of the conflict? It is too early to say, because we do not know where the journey is taking us or what the future will be.

Certainly, we are different in that we have sectarian crime and not just sectarian crime but sectarian antisocial behaviour, which is very prevalent and is a conditioning factor that does not present in many other societies. Racism in Britain would not necessarily be articulated at Westminster, whereas here people look straight at the Assembly and say, "That is what they are telling us to do" or "They agree with us". This is not necessarily the fault of politicians, but it is how people read the connection between themselves and political leadership and is another slight difference.

Professor Hamber: I will add a few points. This one is slightly wider than the violence issue. There is some evidence to show that issues can skip a generation in societies that have been through large-scale forms of political conflict. In Latin American countries, such as Argentina and Chile, it is often the grandchildren who are dealing with a lot of the unfinished business of the past. Sometimes their parents might not have got the full story or were maybe too tired as a result of the conflict, and so it is the grandchildren rather than the children who take on the issues. We do not know whether that will happen here, but it is possible.

Pete was moving towards issues that are more directly related to mental health. I want to make the same point in relation to crime. This is a relatively low-crime society, but the statistics for suicide and mental health are higher than those for the rest of the UK. I do not have them in front of me, but I have written a paper on the subject that is focused on young people and draws on the work of Mike Tomlinson and others that I am happy to share. The statistics are definitely elevated.

Allusion was made to domestic violence. There is certainly anecdotal evidence that domestic violence has increased post conflict, but it is quite hard to research it fully, although I have tried to do so through a number of research projects. There is generally some evidence to show that domestic violence has gone up. Whether that is due to a change in reporting or is a mutation into domestic violence after the conflict, something that Pete alluded to, is difficult to establish academically. There is certainly a lot of research and literature that makes that assertion. We do not know it for a fact here, but, if you were commissioning work, I would say, "Look in the direction of violence in the home".

Pete also alluded to young people and sectarian antisocial behaviour or whatever word we would like to use. Pete has talked about this better than me. I imagine — again, I cannot state it unequivocally without the statistics in front of me — that fear of movement, fear of the other community, must be significantly higher here than in other areas, which is not to say that they do not exist in other parts of the United Kingdom.

The final issue for us to interrogate — and maybe this is pie in the sky or a bit too large-scale — is the degree to which in segregated communities, where there is less investment and where people are looking inward, their economic opportunities are impacted upon. Again, although I do not think I can verify this scientifically with the papers I have in front of me, there may well be evidence about the economic opportunities for people who are growing up with the legacy of the conflict and their potential to reach out across boundaries and into multicultural societies globally. There is the potential that young people are still being significantly disadvantaged, which is a legacy of the interface of conflict and poverty, conflict and poverty being a lethal mix.

Mr D McIlveen: Obviously, T:BUC is committed to dealing with the underlying issues, including poverty and that side of things. I have a quick final question, which is not based on any scientific evidence either. Setting mental health to the side, as a serious illness that has to be dealt with, is there a risk that by giving so much attention to a strategy dealing with antisocial behaviour, domestic violence and those types of behaviours, you almost provide a licence for bad behaviour?

Professor Shirlow: It is the other way round: it is about how you cope and deal with that issue. You would be looking to engage with kids who have been involved in antisocial behaviour. There is an interesting point here, because we sometimes slip into the view that, in these communities, everyone is the same. In these communities, there are also people who are open, tolerant and who wish to build bridges. There are also people who were involved in charities or who have had children with serious illnesses and have had to go and meet groups in west and east Belfast. We ought to remember that there is a lot of really good, positive activity going on in the communities that suffered the greatest loss of life in the Troubles.

I remember one time we were doing outreach work with kids who were throwing stones at the emergency services, and, of course, they were being taken here, there and everywhere. Somebody came round to me and said: "It is not fair that they get to go on all the trips, and we get to go nowhere because we are well-behaved." Of course, the kid who is well behaved probably comes from a much more structured home. I do not think that anybody would misbehave and become involved in something like that. These things are already too embedded in their lives.

Professor Hamber: As far as criminology is concerned, I also do not think that that is the case; but there is a risk that by overly focusing on certain issues, and legislating for them in different ways, you would see an increase in types of behaviours because of the way you define them. If you define low levels of interaction between young people as antisocial behaviour, then it looks like the focus has increased that form of behaviour, but it is the legislation that has redefined things.

Professor Shirlow: This reminds me of something that happened in north Belfast. A community activist worked for years to get his next-door neighbour involved in community activity. The next-door neighbour was a plumber, who came home every night and did things with his kids. For years and years he was told: "You should take an interest in your community; you should engage with your community; you should show leadership in your community". "No, I do not want to do that." Then, one night, the community activist was out, only to find that his kids were rioting while the plumber's kids were sitting in the house doing their homework. It goes back to the fact that there are really complex issues in these communities.

Professor Hamber: The point was made earlier that we need to be careful in our analysis of something like T:BUC. We can be completely in favour of something like the United Youth scheme, but the document is phrased in such a way as to suggest that the scheme is aimed at the 46,000 people who are unemployed. There are a lot of paragraphs before and after about sectarianism and other types of behaviour. There may well be higher levels of certain behaviours in that group, but we do not know that for a fact, and so there is a risk that by targeting different communities we end up stigmatising them, rather than stepping back and taking a wider definition of sectarianism as being something that is embedded right through our society and not necessarily just in specific communities. We have to be quite careful with our phraseology and policy and how the public perceive some of those types of interventions.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Let us finish on that point, because we have to assume that T:BUC will be around for some years to come, not least the strategy to remove walls in ten years. If you could make one suggestion to improve either the vision of the strategy or the route map for achieving it, what would it be?

Professor Shirlow: We are academics, so this is quite difficult for us.

Professor Hamber: You go first, Pete.

Professor Shirlow: I would suggest an evidential base that creates the foundation for T:BUC and therefore guides its aims, objectives and outcomes.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): You said that there was a lot of research already.

Professor Shirlow: That could be incorporated more into —

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): It needs refined.

Professor Shirlow: I know that the youth support group is still deliberating on what to do. I would like to see some of the research that has been done. I would like to see that being discussed, at least, and then, hopefully, providing a foundation for the aims, objectives and evaluation.

Professor Hamber: What I would suggest is at the political level, and I know that this is not easy. Could we agree a set of high-level outcomes that we would like — for example, "We would like to have the peace walls down by 2023"? We should have high-level outcomes, such as that we would like to move towards an integrated education system and x% mixed housing and set dates for those. Then, we should look at the steps needed to get to those points and gear resources towards some of those high-level issues of segregation and separation that the document talks about.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Brandon and Pete, thank you both very much indeed. That was most useful.