Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): We are very grateful to Interaction Belfast for hosting us today. The witnesses joining us are Roisin McGlone of Interaction Belfast; Johnston Price from Forthspring Inter Community Group, whom we have met before; and Caroline Murphy and Terry Donaghy from the Suffolk Community Forum. All four are very welcome. Forthspring Inter Community Group and Interaction Belfast have provided written evidence through our call for evidence. The Suffolk pocket plots initiative was brought to our attention by the Northern Ireland Environment Link (NIEL) in its written submission. Caroline, I understand that you have been unwell since Christmas, so I want to say a particular thank you for considering it important enough to make yourself available today. I appreciate that.

Ms Caroline Murphy (Suffolk Community Forum): Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): No doubt you have enough to fill the afternoon, but we will try to restrict you, collectively, to 10 minutes, if that is OK, so that we get the best interaction possible.

Mr Johnston Price (Forthspring Inter Community Group): I will start off and keep it very brief before handing over to Caroline and then Roisin.

Thanks, first, for your invitation and the opportunity to come along. We can talk more specifically during questions about the interface, but I will reiterate the general points made about Together: Building a United Community (T:BUC) in Forthspring's submission to the Committee. We believe that T:BUC fundamentally lacks ambition. It lacks a vision of what a shared society would look like, which makes it quite an impoverished document. It lacks a commitment to tackling sectarianism, and the absence of a definition of good relations is a barrier to helping to promote a more positive society and a clear sense of where we want to go as a community.

The document reads like a compromise, albeit that it has desirable measures within it. Overall, it feels very much like the lowest common denominator. It is not a policy that gives us vision or encouragement at interfaces or anywhere else in our society. We raised a specific point about the funding that has been derived from OFMDFM, and we carefully used the word "appalling". There has been a series of delays, an absence of transparency and there is no appeal process. There is a widely held belief that it is, at best, a political carve-up and, at worst, a sectarian carve-up. In the absence of transparency, people will talk, as it were.

There is an opportunity, post the Stormont House Agreement, to address the legacy of the conflict in T:BUC. That was, as many people pointed out, a glaring omission from the original policy. There is a huge amount of work to be done in interfaces on safety, regeneration and relationships, and more vision would create more opportunity there.

Ms Murphy: I will not talk about the strategy per se. Rather, I will talk about how we interpret it on the ground and what we are doing, which I believe is what NIEL referred to. In putting into practice building united communities, we, as an interface community, have some land within the Suffolk boundaries that we are trying to develop into shared space. We worked for a long time with Lenadoon on the shared space building on the Stewartstown Road, but we are now working with the communities off the Blacks Road, Willowvale and the surrounding area, and Brooke to develop a little interface buffer zone of 0·8 of an acre into shared family-size allotments. In order to do that, we are supported by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. I have been working towards this since late 2009, which indicates that it is a very slow process. We are coming to the nitty-gritty now of consultations with colleagues and friends, not only in Suffolk but on the other side of the interface. There has never been any interaction between the two, so there are trust issues there: who will trust whom?

As I said, we are working with the Housing Executive. We have been talking to Matt Garrett and some of the other community representatives from the Brooke area to put this into practice. Money should not be a driver, but we have applied to Space and Place because we cannot do anything unless we have sufficient funds to do it. We are now through to the final stage of Space and Place, looking at asking for £350,000 towards making it a reality. Beside the buffer zone, there is a large piece of contested ground on which we plan, and hope, to develop a fishing and leisure park that will be shared space. You have the drawings for that. They are very rough topographical drawings. The allotments will be the first phase; the fishing and leisure park will be the second phase. Basically, it is bringing down to the ground the aspiration of building united communities. To make this viable and sustainable, we want to make it economically viable and develop it into a social enterprise. Key to all that would be developing a horticultural training centre on the contested land alongside the fishing and leisure park, developing stuff from that and an interface market.

I am quite happy to answer any questions on that, but I do not want to labour the subject. The handout that we gave you shows the main bullet points. As I say, we are not talking about the strategy, which, to people on the ground, is way up in the air somewhere; we are talking about how it is on the ground.

Ms Roisin McGlone (Interaction Belfast): I will try to marry the two things that we have just been talking about. We need to contextualise T:BUC and what it is really about. For us, T:BUC really should be a contribution towards a reconciliation process — it is as simple as that.

We have provided you with an extensive written submission. If you want to know about the organisation, some of the things that we have done and the theories and policies behind what we have done, you will find all that in the submission. I did not want to play on that, emphasise it or talk about this organisation. Really, I wanted to talk about what reconciliation is. Very briefly, it is both a goal and a process. In your case, politics is to deal with the issues that divided our past, whereas we see our grass-roots reconciliation process as a process to redesign the relationships of the imperfect reality that we have. That has some very painful challenges. The problem with T:BUC is that it reflects the politicians' temptation to concentrate on the political process element of issues: looking at schools, young people, walls and interfaces. I think that, sometimes — to give you your fair due — as politicians, you are concerned about examining the past because you think that there is a danger of damaging the political and social stability. The reality of reconciliation is that it applies to all of us, and we need to come to terms with the past in order to guarantee that we do not go back to it.

Moving on slightly from T:BUC, although I will come back to it, I think that the Stormont House Agreement certainly has given us more meat on the bones of what could be done with regard to a reconciliation process. Your job as politicians is to reach agreements and negotiate about issues of conflict. You find the compromise, you bargain and you pragmatically cooperate within the bound of your self-interest and party interests. That is a vital part of our transformation from conflict, but our job is to address the broken relationships between the communities that you represent as well as the issues that broke us.

The sad reality is that we do not have a lot of money, and we know that there is not a lot of money. However, T:BUC misses out completely on two things that do not cost a lot: the ordinary people who are prepared to pay a personal rather than a financial price to achieve progress; and the home-grown mechanisms developed from learned and lived experiences on interfaces. I have been working on interfaces in north and west Belfast since about 1966. We have developed mobile phone networks, forms of peaceful protest, peace projects and protocols. The international community realises the importance of reconciliation as an ingredient in conflict prevention, human security and peace building. People from all over the world come to this organisation, and probably to the other two organisations as well — Japan, eastern Europe and America — to look at our practice. Yet our practice is not being implemented in T:BUC or in some of the issues around it.

I will not go on for much longer. The work on interfaces should not be focused on the walls — they are the least important part. What appears to have happened through T:BUC is that the architecture has become important. There are three stages of reconciliation at interfaces. First, replace fear by non-violent coexistence, and I think that most of us have done that over the last number of years. Secondly, where fear no longer rules, we should be building confidence and trust, and I think that we have begun to do that among activists but not necessarily among residents on the ground. The final stage, which we have not yet reached, is the move towards empathy.

My appeal to you is this: recognise the expertise in the field; allow this to happen through joined-up government codes of practice and protocols, and involve civic society in developing and evolving that process of reconciliation. However, most important of all is this: will somebody please be our champion?

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Thank you all very much. You have given us some very fundamental challenges in terms of the document and practice on the ground.

I will start with your very last point, Roisin. You said that, collectively, you get global interest in what you do on the ground but that it is not matched, if I heard you correctly, by the level of interest from across town — Parliament Buildings.

Ms R McGlone: I do not think that we have the mechanisms yet. I go back to the point that I made about politicians. You have your role to play and we have our role to play in reconciliation. In civic society, I do not think that we have yet found the mechanisms to be able to do that. I think that there may be an opportunity, through T:BUC, as part of a reconciliation process, to do that, but we do not yet have the mechanism to bring out the best. Some of our work is recorded in books written in Australia, Jerusalem and America. Another one, Vicky Cosstick's book on interfaces, is coming out quite soon. On the back of the work that we do, many academics are publishing PhDs and books about the peace process, but I do not think that Stormont has found a mechanism yet whereby civic society can be engaged.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): That is a fair point, and flowing from the Stormont House Agreement is the question of how we re-engage civic society. After 1998, there was the Civic Forum.

Ms R McGlone: I was a member of that forum, Mike, so I know about that.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): I was not in this role at the time, but my impression of today's critique of it is that it did not work. Is that reasonable as a headline?

Ms R McGlone: I will be absolutely blunt: there was not a lot of political support for it. First, people were interested in other things. Secondly, the Civil Service did not know how to deal with it. The forum was made up of a diverse range of people from the Orange Order to residents' groups to community relations groups to Church groups, and the Civil Service did not know how to handle us. A direct rule Civil Service did not have the skills to deal with civic society. No offence — you do not expect them to. Thirdly, maybe it was not facilitated as well as it could have been. We were probably at fault as well, because we did not know what we were doing either.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): I do not want to stray too far from the role of Chair, but I sense that there is a commitment from the five parties to try to find a way to do it that is affective. That is ongoing.

I was struck by your comment that what we are talking about is a goal and a process. Caroline, you made the point that it is slow. What factors slow it down?

Ms Murphy: There is a lack of trust between communities; uncertainty about the position of the volunteers who make up the community forums and how they can be sustained; and a high level of burnout — Terry is very committed, but he could tell you about the amount of unpaid work that he does. Those are all very real factors. There is also a lack of commitment among many of the agencies that we work with in the statutory sector. We have been very lucky with the Housing Executive, which has been absolutely superb in its support, but we do not know, given all the cuts and so forth, what resources we will have in the forum itself. Then, we are trying to work on the ground to get trust, not only of the other community but of the community in Suffolk. We want to say to them, "You'll not be betrayed. This land might be within your boundary and might be considered your territory, but your neighbours are important, too, and this will be so much better if it is shared". All those factors make it a slow and laborious process. It has been speeding up just recently, but you need to watch your step.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): If trust is a fundamental value, presumably one of the great threats to it is beyond your control, namely external events that just happen.

Ms Murphy: They do, but we have been very lucky in the sense that somebody up there is pushing it along anyway. We have had the flags protest and a lot of negativity about that, and we have seen the way in which disadvantaged Protestant communities are alienated and disaffected, but, somehow or other, we have managed to keep this ball in the air. We are blooming determined that we will continue with it.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Johnston, you began by very starkly criticising the document for a lack of vision. This is your opportunity to put your thoughts on the record.

Mr Price: The first thing to be said is that it is called Together: Building a United Community, so we have to accept that we have very different constitutional aspirations in this place, live with that and do so in such a way that we can respect and get on with each other.

You asked about impediments to progress. There is a lack of trust, but there are historical reasons for that, and they need to be addressed. There is also cynicism, and it is important that political leaders do not send out contradictory messages all the time. On the one hand, we get positive media and press releases about urban villages; on the other hand, we get very bitter squabbling about the past or whatever.

If our vision is of a place where we respect and trust each other, there are other things that we can do. People keeping their word would help. There was a commitment in the Good Friday Agreement to an anti-poverty strategy. A lot of the time, we look at the relationship between communities in terms of Protestant and Catholic, but, in fact, a lot of people suffer chronic social and economic disadvantage, and that can be underpinned by people feeling very alienated and disengaged. If you wanted to send out positive messages, you would do what you said that you would do and keep your word.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): What is your vision? Do you have one?

Mr Price: Yes. It is maybe what Belfast was like briefly in and around 1995, when people were prepared to engage with each other and there was optimism. My vision is of a place where a Protestant can choose to live where he wants and Catholics can live where they want; where we do not have to talk about buffers and segregation; and where I can aspire to be whatever I want to be in terms of my identity and can respect someone else's identity. It is not really that complicated — it is a place where people are decent to each other.

One of the projects that I have been working on recently is the 5 Decades project, which deals with very contentious issues because it is about people's experience of living through the conflict. I am not wearing rose-tinted spectacles, but I was shocked — I do not think that that is too strong a word — by the extent of the generosity and understanding that people displayed for other people's experience, which is at odds with much of the political rhetoric on the subject.

I think that we need to create space where people can engage with each other, share the difficult experiences that they have had and treat each other with respect. Belfast is my city; it is a place that I love.

Forthspring has a very large youth project, and I have seen a noticeable change in the attitudes of young people. That is an important message to get across. I have been working in and around here for six years and have definitely seen change in that period. Young people are more into sharing and getting on with each other; they have less time for bitterness and old animosities. So, when thinking about impediments, we should not ignore the fact that there has been change in this place. There are many ways in which it is a more decent, a fairer and a more equal place.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): You have given us something very positive there. You also say that, to a certain extent, 1995 was a high point for you. How would you characterise the journey from 1995 to 2015?

Mr Price: It has been a journey from hope and optimism to cynicism, which is a sad reflection of where we are today.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Not for young people, though.

Mr Price: Young people have found their own way, and you make a fair point. We talk to young people from this part of the city, and, 20 years ago, they would never have been in the city centre. They have more space now. I am not saying that it is ideal by any means. There are enormous inequalities in our city. Every day, when I come to work, I come into an area where less than 30% of the kids get five or more GCSEs. At night, I travel home to an area where, in many locations, 90% or more of kids will get five or more GCSEs. It is not surprising that we have tensions, division and alienation in our city, but we can have a much better city and a much better society.

Ms Murphy: May I come in on the back of something that Johnston said? I mentioned the alienation of disadvantaged Protestant communities. You have the strategy and all that it purports to support and wants to take forward, but, on the ground, as Johnston said, qualification levels are extremely low, particularly amongst Protestants. Suffolk is an enclave, and those on the other side of the interface are slightly better off, so there is that kind of inequality there. If we are developing something, we have to be aware of, and try to cater for, the reality on the ground. There are low qualifications, significant health deficits and low job expectations — low expectations in general. That is the bread-and-butter issue that walks hand in hand with all this.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Let us look at that again because educational underachievement is not new, and it is not confined to Protestant working-class boys. It has been around for decades, not years. Health issues have been around for decades, not years. It seems to me that, as a Government, we put an awful lot of effort into measuring: for example, we have the Noble indices, super output areas and league tables. We spend tens of millions, and, on some occasions, even over £100 million on specific communities, yet they remain in the same place in the league table. Whatever we are doing, it is not working.

Ms R McGlone: It is not working.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Does this document contribute to a fix?

Ms R McGlone: I do not know. The consensus of people on the ground is that they are very cynical about the T:BUC document. I cannot not say that. I am in the community relations sector, and people have been scrabbling around for a long time. It is not all about T:BUC. One of our problems is that funders have different needs, and we have to meet those needs. There is not even a joined-up approach there, and there is not a joined-up approach in government either. To me, T:BUC looks like a fragmented document, in that there is a bit about young people, a bit about schools and a bit about interfaces, which is all about taking down walls. I cannot help being cynical when we look back at Bloomberg, somebody from outside this country saying that we need to take down the walls. No, we do not. We need to get people to build relationships so that they want the walls to come down. We have that the wrong way round.

You are right, Mike, that a lot of things have not changed, and yet, like Johnston, I am amazed by the resilience of young people and their ability not to take some of the routes that we have taken. Although the communities that we work with are still a bit frightened and they are frightened when they hear about a wall coming down or whatever, they are much more generous than our politicians sometimes.

I know that you are politicians and it sounds as if I am saying that you are something separate, but you just have to listen to the radio sometimes and you do not want to come to work in the morning. You say to yourself, "Is that the way we are going?". I am being serious about that: we need examples and models of good practice, and we need champions. We need people who are talking about a reconciliation process. We need to start using that language and those processes, and we need to start unpicking that. There are loads of international examples; we are not the first country that has had conflict or which is post-conflict. I am sorry, but sometimes it can be very frustrating when you are working such a long time in the field and you see —

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Absolutely. I will take that criticism on the chin because it is, sometimes, challenging to demonstrate the spirit of generosity that I think is important for somebody like me to show. It is too easy to be negative; I am guilty of that on occasions, so I certainly take that point.

Caroline, you said that money should not be a driver, but, presumably —

Ms Murphy: You cannot do anything without it either.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): So it is.

Ms Murphy: It is about finding a balance. I am quite passionate about what we are doing, but I am also very frustrated at times because of the distrust between communities — "They are not going to do this because they etc etc". They live cheek by jowl, but they do not know each other and they are not willing to come out. I talked about deficits, but you can translate that into lack of confidence and apathy — "No matter what we do, nothing is going to change". I want to grab them and tell them that it is going to change but that they need to work at it. You are looking at a strategy on the one hand; yes, we can pick through it and see where we can use it, but we cannot do it on our own. We are not driven by money, but we cannot do it without money or support.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): You said that sometimes you want to grab people and tell them that they have to work at it. Are people willing to work at it?

Ms Murphy: Yes; not universally so, but yes, of course they are. You will get the naysayers —

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Of course.

Ms Murphy: — People are willing to work at it, but they need the drivers.

Ms R McGlone: We started the mobile network between 1996 and 1998 when Drumcree was at its worst, and we started it in north Belfast. Twenty or 30 people from both communities gave up 24 hours, seven days a week, and not one penny changed hands. That has since developed across the whole of the North. It has to be something worthwhile. Why would you want to bring somebody out of their house? As you were saying, Caroline, there has to be a benefit. Why would you take on dealing with difficult relationships if you could just stay in your own area and not worry too much about them'uns on the other side of the fence? You would not have to have any difficult meetings and go to places and people that you were frightened of. Why would you? Why would anybody? It has to be done.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): I have two more points before I open it up to members. I want to go back to Johnston's opening remarks. We talked about the lack of vision that he identified in the document. Then you said that there was a failure to make a commitment to tackle sectarianism. Does that mean, Johnston, that you simply want to see the words "we will commit to tackling sectarianism" in the document or do you want to see a vision or route map for how that will be achieved?

Mr Price: We need a legal definition of good relations for a start so that it can be promoted in a way that supports and underpins equality but which gives us a sense of the society that we want, where we can acknowledge that it is wrong to be discriminatory or bigoted. We need to send out a positive message on that.

I want to make a brief comment about money. When T:BUC came out, all the consultation on the Peace IV moneys showed clearly that the line being taken on Peace IV was informed by the limitations of T:BUC. More progress has been made in the Stormont House Agreement, and it would be useful if some consideration were given to having a wider notion of how the Peace IV moneys were spent, certainly in relation to dealing with the past and the legacy of the conflict.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): You have covered sectarianism and good relations, and I think that I am right in saying that work is being done on a definition of good relations.

The Committee Clerk: It was supposed to be in the context of —

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): The new commission, yes.

Ms McGahan: Thank you. I apologise for missing your presentation. I have just come from the Employment and Learning Committee, where we were dealing with a wheen of community groups that might lose their funding under the European social fund (ESF), and quite a number of them are from Belfast.

I want to zoom in on poverty and disadvantage. I represent Fermanagh and South Tyrone. I am from a rural area, and I look at Belfast and see universities sitting on top of each other — a wheen of community groups delivering skills and qualifications and an FE college — and, for the life of me, I cannot understand why we have so much poverty and disadvantage, because it is generally accepted that skills and qualifications are key to taking you out of poverty and disadvantage. There is probably another problem with intergenerational poverty, and there is a strategy to deliver social change. I would like to hear your views on that.

Mr Price: This is probably more a personal than an organisational view. The answer is fairly straightforward: we reproduce inequality in this society through education, and we do it through a segregated and divisive education system. It is perfectly grand if you get a grammar-school education and then the universities with all the investment put into them are waiting for you. OK, there might be some difficulties with loans, but your access to the labour market improves dramatically . The FE college is there as well. However, there is a whole raft of young people in this city and in our society across the board who are not being given those opportunities, and that is how you deliver your resources and use them. Whilst we continue to ignore the fact — I have to point the finger particularly at politicians who are elected in working-class areas and who are content to support an education system that does that disservice to the young people in their areas — it is a crime; it is a sin; it is a disgrace to our society. We will remain an unequal society whilst that remains the case.

Ms McGahan: I know that the Minister of Education has the view that every school should be a good school; no child should be left behind. What is the issue?

Ms R McGlone: Education is not just about school. In some senses, we see a terrible lack of confidence in communities; there is a lack of aspiration and a lack of confidence. That is linked in with parenting — I mean that in the broadest sense possible; I do not mean parenting skills. As far as I can see, certainly from the nationalist and unionist communities that I work with, there is a leftover of trauma that disables people from having aspirations and having thought for the future. I very rarely speak to working-class people on either side of this interface who talk about university. I am from a working-class background, and I went to university as did my children, but we are losing those kids as well. That is the other thing, Bronwyn: we are losing kids who are going to university. From working in this area, I see that people have a lack of confidence in their ability to bring their kids up, to encourage their kids, and to have aspirations for them. I do not know what schools can do about that.

Mr Price: The point here is very clear. It does not really matter how you set about explaining it; it does not matter even how you analyse it. All you have to do is look at the outcomes. You look at the outcomes, and if that is the outcome, it is not a satisfactory outcome. You can blame whomever you want — the communities, the parents or whatever else — but it is not a fair outcome. It is a costly outcome for our society, because you are perfectly right about the role that skills and qualifications play in promoting a positive economy, but we are ensuring — whether every school is a good school, whether every child pursues the same curriculum — that the outcome is not the same. The life choices and opportunities for so many young people are so much better than for others. It is happening in very geographic and very concentrated areas. If we want to change that, we would put resources into those areas and into the schools to start levelling out the outcomes. It would have quite a political impact in some ways, but if this is the society that we want now, we have it; if we want a different one, we have to invest in all our children.

Ms Murphy: It is very important to realise that when you look at the areas and see the schools and the universities you think that everybody has those opportunities, but, as Johnston says, they do not. I am from an inner east Belfast family whose tradition was that the boys went into trades and the girls went to a good office job. This particular girl wanted to go to university but could not go until a later stage. I was very lucky, because I had parents who were interested and who looked beyond where they lived in an inner-city area. Yes, they would have been among what used to be called the labour aristocracy in that my father had a trade. However, that is not the situation on the ground; that is not what is happening in the schools that our children go to.

My background is in teaching literacy and essential skills. A wide-ranging survey was done in the early 90s that revealed that 24% of people in Northern Ireland had a reading age of 11. That is one in four. How are children going through school not able to read and write properly? That needs to be addressed, as it has been a bone of contention for years. There has been talk about it; we are good at talking, but we are not good at really looking at stuff. We have league tables for schools. We say that a school is a good school because A, B C and D pass A, B C and D, but what about the children who are slower? What about those mixed abilities? What about doing something about how we direct teaching, how we stream those children and how we stop looking at success? Look at training; we have children and young people being constantly recycled on training, and for what?

Ms McGahan: The universities have the Widening Access strategy, which is used to tackle those areas of poverty and disadvantage. Is that not working?

Ms R McGlone: No; not in this area.

Ms McGahan: OK. Have you had conversations with people in the universities to say that you need a game changer because the strategy is not working?

Ms R McGlone: We work on interfaces, Bronwyn, and that is what we concentrate on. It is not something that I have been a part of.

Mr Price: Forthspring works with young people and provides opportunities to get them back into training so that they can get some initial qualifications. However, the dice are loaded against them. The universities have those commitments. but people have to get to a certain point on the education ladder before they can access the universities.

Ms McGahan: But there are strategies for that, even at FE level. I sit on the DEL Committee so I am across that, but maybe I will do a follow-up with you on that to drill down and see what the problems are from a DEL perspective.

Mr Price: That would be grand, yes.

Ms R McGlone: Absolutely.

Mr Price: This is not unconnected to T:BUC, because if you want a society with better relationships and equality you need to give people the opportunities to play their part in that society.

Ms R McGlone: And to contribute.

Ms Murphy: I have been talking about practice on the ground. If I say to you, for example, that we would like a horticultural training centre, it would not be stand-alone. The Colin neighbourhood partnership has a little training area, and we have the Colin Glen Trust; we can work together to develop rounded qualifications. The green economy is a growth area; can we respond to that? Can we respond to the lack of training in areas? We can take from a wide catchment, but there needs to be a purpose.

Government are willing to give grants to employers, but the outcomes are not there. The money is going to employers for training and, maybe, the trainees are taken on for so many months, but then they are dropped off at the other end. Education also needs to have progression routes. You are looking at a strategy at the top, but you need to look at a practical strategy on the ground that responds to a variety of actions and economic realities. There is a mismatch with what is actually happening. There are aspirations with these strategies, but they are not translating down on the ground.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Caroline, there is the question of the role of the Government at Stormont. At the moment, it seems to me that we try to set a strategy that, as you correctly identify, sits up there well divorced from day-to-day life on the ground. Is it up to us not just to say, "Here is the strategy, but here is, figuratively speaking, the 400-page manual for delivering it, and unless you tick every box you do not get your funding."? Should we not be saying, "You take the power, we have set the vision, you know how to deliver it on the ground here"? How you deliver it on the ground here might be different from how you deliver it in Dungiven or on the Newtownards Road. In fact, the way you deliver it on the Lower Newtownards Road is probably significantly different from how you might deliver it on the Upper Newtownards Road. Would it be mature of us as a government to say, "You know the vision; you deliver it as you see fit on the ground"?

Ms Murphy: I think so, but by the same token you need to have mechanisms in place whereby there is good monitoring and evaluation of what is going on. A lot of money has been wasted on pilots and three-year funding cycles. In the first year of funding, you are setting all your ducks in a row, if you like; in the second year, you are coming into your stride; but by the end of the third year you are off the other end and there is something else, some new flavour of the month, to move onto. There needs to be continuity and good monitoring and evaluation and, yes, there needs to be recognition that the community organisations are working like hell on the ground. We are all working in interface areas — working like hell and getting nowhere.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): OK. Let me park funding, because we have had issues raised by other groups. I want to come back, Johnston and Roisin, to this idea that we are high accountability and low trust. If we were to rebalance to higher trust and essential accountability in evaluating and monitoring, what impact would that make?

Ms R McGlone: It would make a big impact. We are in the business of building relationships, except between one another. When anything happens at an interface area, on the Newtownards Road or wherever, the police and the community workers are called out. However, when there is nothing happening, when we are building the peace and making sure that things are happening properly, suddenly everybody disappears, there is no money available, and we are scrabbling around for pennies.

I would love to ask you about all the evaluations that you do and all the targets that you set; where does it all go? What have we learned from it? Is there a central bank somewhere that all that knowledge goes into that we have missed? Unless there is trust between politicians and community workers, all you will do is keep sucking us dry. There will be burnout, as Caroline mentioned earlier. Some of us may be already beyond burnout. Young people are not volunteering to do the type of work that we are doing. They will get involved in projects or come to a couple of meetings, but that is it. They look on us as eejits, the people who did the heavy-duty lifting. There are a couple of funders who are very good examples. The Irish Government's funding package to us over the years has been a lifeline, and they are very open and very trusting, but they get the results. We seem to be always meeting criteria, Mike, but we are never quite sure what the end result is.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): It is kind of obsessive.

Ms R McGlone: Yes, it is obsessive.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Fifty shades of measurement.

Ms R McGlone: Just call it a different thing. There is a new one out at the moment.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Johnston, do you have anything to add about accountability and trust?

Mr Price: It may be stating the obvious, but the role of politicians is to give leadership and to create good policy. It might sound a bit optimistic or naive, even, but rather than the politics of deals and compromise, what about setting some objectives for where we want to be as a society and get there? When government get it very badly wrong, it has practical consequences. Bronwyn talked about widening access and increasing participation. Yet DEL virtually destroyed the adult and community education sector under very poor leadership. That has enormous impact on any possible remedial action against the disadvantage that people suffer in the education system in the first place. It is not just about improving the relationship; it is also about getting it right. The consequences of getting it wrong are all too real for people.

Mr Maskey: I sometimes find conversations a bit frustrating, because I am not sure that we are even at the point of having the real conversation. In the last evidence session, we heard from academics, who are very good people for the most part. They talk about taking down the peace walls; outcomes are taking down so many peace walls. There are, however, a lot of velvet curtains, as I would refer to them, that may as well be breeze-block walls. It just happens to be a higher class of segregation. Nobody is tackling professional bigotry.

Some of you will know about my own direct experience. Interestingly, Johnston, you were talking about the '94-'95 period, when the European Parliament funding boards started up. They were very good and challenged a lot of people, bringing together sectors that would not work together before. Alex, you were on that committee in Belfast. To me that was a breakthrough from where we had been when people would not go into the same room or people were excluded from the same rooms. That brought politicians, community groups, trade unions, business people and statutory bodies together, with the theme being how to tackle disadvantage, underpinned and overlaid with community relations and tackling division. Millions of pounds were spent. I was very pleased with the money that was disbursed for the most part into a lot of projects. A lot was really spent on building capacity in communities. A lot of the single-identity work and the projects could have been building something, but it was really about bringing people together. All that in my opinion was very good. Obviously, a lot of it was not as successful as you might have liked, but still it was going on at the time. It was all very embryonic.

Here we are so many years later, still talking about the same treadmill aimed at tackling some of the disadvantage; but we are still not dovetailing it into community relations. We need to get to is the point where we are saying: "If I am not ambitious enough, someone tell me what I need to be." I make no apologies for thinking that some of the T:BUC aspirations to bring thousands of young people together and place them in different communities are never going to happen in the numbers that I would like. I cannot see it happening, because I do not think there is enough buy-in in some of the communities. There might be an issue to do with money and capacity to bring groups of people in. I would look at that. I would be saying this: "Well, OK, if an area wants to bring people in and give them a meaningful shared experience and all the rest of it, in the way that T:BUC outlines, let us see if we can build the infrastructure". Organisations like yourselves would, in my opinion, be at the coalface. I do not see that happening. If OFMDFM went tomorrow morning and picked 20 areas, people would probably run out of the frigging area if they were asked to take 20 or 50 young people from September. They would be challenged to get them placed. I am being honest about that.

There are brilliant organisations on the ground, your own included, and a lot of brilliant work going on, including by Lenadoon and Suffolk. I live just up the street from Suffolk on Suffolk Road. There is an awful lot of good work going on, but then a lot of people beyond the people who are doing the good work are just getting on with their life. A lot of people I know are, thankfully, doing OK. How do we get to people who are maybe dead on but are still living a half-segregated life, if you know what I mean? I agree with you. My kids, all my nephews and nieces, are going into places now where they would not have gone before. That is good. That is maybe more organic; that is what we can build on. Some of the older people are set in their ways and will not rush out to meet one another. Take it, Suffolk.

Ms R McGlone: And neither they should, Alex.

Mr Maskey: Maybe in some cases we are trying to flog a dead horse. Maybe we need to have a different conversation.

Mr Price: One of the ways you can definitely connect with people is through their children and their grandchildren. People may say, "I have lived life the way I have", but, when you ask them about their hopes and aspirations, you see that they have a lot of ambition for their children and grandchildren.

This is a bugbear of mine. Often children, particularly from the middle-class areas you were alluding to, Alex, meet other children from around the world. They go on study tours, they take part in house-building programmes through Habitat for Humanity or whatever and yet they do not meet people from different backgrounds in their own city. We certainly have plenty of young people on the Springfield Road who are more than willing to take part in programmes to help them form a positive relationship with people from a different background. Organisations that work with young people, particularly the Churches, need to focus a bit more on how we connect as a society. The selling point to people who are prepared to lead their comfortable lives behind whatever sort of curtains they have is this: what sort of place do you want to live in? What sort of society do you want? Do you want the lowest common denominator and to ignore your neighbour, or do you want somewhere where you can reach out and be generous? People here who live behind their curtains can also get very critical when there is a negative impact on the economy or they cannot drive their car into work or whatever.

There is a downside to all this, but we are prepared to spend a large sum out of the public purse on things like corporation tax, when in fact, this whole area of sharing and overcoming segregation and division would arguably have a much better impact on how people view this as a location down the road. At the minute, all we are doing, from looking at T:BUC, is trying to steer Peace IV into funding the narrow areas that have been identified in T:BUC. We are not really taking on the challenge of shared space as a society.

Mr Maskey: I will just follow up on the last point. For me, the question of how to define good community relations is the nub of it. The peace process is predicated on basically saying that we have different constitutional aspirations; I think you coined it yourself. That is there, and we are not going to change that until it is changed. People, however, have clearly held views, and I suspect that most people, when you scratch the surface, still have those views, which is fair enough. They are quite entitled to them. That is the difference between the old days of community relations, when we all let on that we did not have a problem, we are all the same, let us all have a nice cup of tea and we will be dead on, and nowadays, when we are supposed to be respecting differences, embracing them and working with them. I respect you, and you respect me and let us get on with it. If people in community relations let on that we do not have any big differences, we will never get an answer. That is being honest. That is not to be negative. I think that most people do respect most other people. In saying that, political representatives still have to talk to people on the doorstep, and people who live in these areas want their representatives to represent their interests. There is a dichotomy in some of this.

I agree with you on long-term funding. I would like to focus on longer-term funding for the delivery of services and on getting the MOUs and service delivery agreements to deliver, whether that is in good relations, tackling disadvantage and so on. An awful lot of good people waste a lot of their very important time chasing funding packages, when they would be better off delivering what they are supposed to be delivering. I am one with you on that.

I would be interested to continue exploring this notion of good relations and how we define them, because I do not think we are at the nub of it yet.

Mr Attwood: I thank you for your forthright approach and the evident sense of exasperation that you convey. I do not think we should deny — that is not what you did — where we have come from in the last 20-odd years. You identified where new generations are compared with where our generation was. There have been multiple and good changes, but I think you capture very well that we are struggling around T:BUC and a lot of our society. We have to recognise that we are struggling and that it is a very big struggle. The scale of what is still needed to be addressed, and how to have the vision, ambition and wherewithal to address it are not being acknowledged or appreciated.

My view is that we are into a long period — a deep phase — of managing our conflict without transforming it. I think that informs our politics and our community, and it creates a sense of detachment and alienation and a lack of confidence in politics, but that is where we are. That needs a huge paradigm shift in the thinking of parties, politicians and leaders at all levels and in how government goes about its business. Otherwise, we will remain in a very long phase of managing and not transforming our conflict. Managing our conflict is better than what we had before, but it is not what our ambition should be. I worry, as that phase is so long, about how it is going to present itself in the lives of our people. Societies either go forward or back; they do not stay the same.

My own view — you know this Roisin because we had this conversation at the event up in Stormont recently — is that, until and unless people like you are in government designing and implementing the right policies, we will struggle further, because I do not think that, in the round, our Government have the capacity to know how to define and put into operation the right programmes that have the right ambition and vision that Johnston spoke about, or to deal with the issues of delays, the absence of transparency and appeal process that you also talked about. I do not think that our system has the capacity, and that was my experience as a Minister. There are very good people, and some are very good at what they do in terms of the radical edge of government but, in the round, it is managing and not really changing. My view is that, until human rights organisations, business organisations, community and voluntary organisations or the NGO sector are in the life of government through a huge secondment strategy, the Government will continue to struggle, even if they had the right policies.

You are also right to nail the issue of relationships; it all comes down to that. Interface is about relationships; parade disputes are about relationships and whether they are respectful or not. That is at the core of the politics at the interfaces, the parades and everything else. By the way, I think that the narrative that the three people presented today has to be at the core of the overview of T:BUC when the time comes to write a report.

Trying to get back to the particulars of the inquiry, I ask you to comment on three things, and I think that they are immediate in terms of T:BUC, despite all its limitations. I was on the Executive when T:BUC was presented as more than it is, and a number of us at Executive level tried to make these points: do not exaggerate what this is; do not be extravagant about it; say what it is as a step in the right direction and let us build on that. Whether we can build on that comes down to the three questions that I would like you to answer. First, Johnston, you made the comment about steering T:BUC into Peace IV to fund narrow areas. Can you say more about that, because I think that there is great concern that that is what is happening? Secondly, there are the three issues that were named — delays, absence of transparency and appeal process — so that, when we come to deal with the granular of T:BUC as well as the overall issue and ambition of T:BUC, we can deal with both sides of that coin. So, the three issues for Peace IV are delays, absence of transparency and the appeal process.

Mr Price: The SEUPB must have heard a wide range of views from across the board about what should go in to Peace IV, yet it looks so similar to T:BUC. Clearly, therefore, it was designed for Peace IV to be the pot of money that would cause T:BUC, when something as central as a shared future should not be a central government concern for funding and should not be the last piece of European money to do that. I do not know what stage the Peace IV process is at now, but it must be very well on. A simple thing is that, lots of projects that were funded around dealing with the past under Peace III, in my judgement, could not be funded under Peace IV simply because of the way that the programme was being structured because of the way that it was being informed by T:BUC. So, I do not know whether the opportunity remains to take some positives out of the Stormont House Agreement and have a higher set of ambitions for Peace IV.

The experience of OFMDFM distributing money is all a bit of a mystery, to be honest. You tend to take the best possible judgement that it is so convoluted and difficult that the conclusion is that it is not about poor administration and that there are obviously more complex problems in the system.

The very first moneys that OFMDFM brought to bear in relation to interfaces was the peace walls programme. There was something systematically wrong with that because it was put together on the assumption that one side would come together with another side, and, somehow, that was always the dynamic round an interface, without any recognition that there are also existing organisations that are developing shared space. So, the thinking behind that was very crude, but things started to get worse when OFMDFM started to give out some of their resources. In a rush to get some moneys to underpin T:BUC, the first round of money was for three months, yet the three-month period was virtually up before any decisions were made on that. When you were less than happy with the decision, and you felt as if you were putting something in, were working on a key interface and your work was being recognised by other people, there was no appeals process or opportunity. The problem with that is not just the frustration that it leaves for unsuccessful applicants — we have all been unsuccessful applicants; we are well used to that — but it gives rise to talk about what is going on. How is money being allocated? Why is it being allocated? What sort of deals are being done? It is very unusual to have a funding programme these days without an appeals process built in.

Ms R McGlone: It has been particularly difficult. Johnston and I share a frustration because you cannot count the unburned buses and you cannot count the riots that did not happen at the Whiterock parade. Whereas, we look at other areas where there is trouble and, there is the thought that, if the money is not coming to us, it must be going to them. Because there is no transparency, we are sitting scribbling around for fivers here or tenners there or running mobile networks, and we see other areas getting money, and we think, "Where is the transparency?" Where is the investment in what does work? We are investing in people who are volunteers. All the networks that we work on are mainly volunteers. Both our organisations are operating on skeleton staff. We are a major interface, we have had major successes, we have done major work over the years, yet there is absolutely no recognition. Then, when we applied to OFMDFM, we heard absolutely nothing for nine months and then we did not hear anything for a year, and it is coming up to this time when we will go through the same process again. That is our experience each time. It opens up the question of whether there is another agenda. Maybe you can tell us. We do not know but we wonder, because of the lack of transparency, whether there is another agenda or something else at work.

Mr Price: I want to make it very clear that I have no objection to any of the grants that were made to the organisations.

Ms R McGlone: I do not know any of them.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): We had said —

Mr Price: My concern is around the process and the lack of confidence that it gives rise to. I also think that we get quite a lot of recognition for the work that we do in Forthspring and, on occasions, we manage to access resources, but it is always a struggle and continues to be one.

Ms R McGlone: We have been sporadically, and we are still here 24 years later; actually, it is coming up to 25 years. What frightens me slightly about Peace IV is that the most innovative work that we did was with the Peace money. When we got the Peace money, we started the mobile phone networks, did the peaceful protest on parades and did trust-building processes with people from north and west Belfast, and they have kept those relationships going. What worries me is that it was never linked with government, and my concern is that, if it is now starting to be linked in with government and we get caught up in a government agenda, it will be risk-averse, there will not be any innovation, there will not be any aspirational stuff in it and there will not be room for people to come up with ideas. It is an old saying but it is like turning on a sixpence, because, if an organisation comes to us tomorrow and says, "There is a problem down the road", we can immediately start working on it. It does not cost anything. You just go out there, meet people, bring people together and see what you can do because you have the infrastructure and the networks there and you have people who you can tap into all the time. If this starts to be linked to government objectives and we do not think that the government objectives are right, what will happen then?

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): We tend to hear two things about the funding structure. The first is that, because of the way that it is done at the moment, money tends to come in very late in a financial year. You have maybe been promised money but you could wait three, six or nine months before you get it, and that obviously has its problems. The other point is about the three-year cycle and the question of why it is only three years. If you have proven the need, which you have done, to get the money —

Ms R McGlone: Mike, three years is very, very unusual. We work on year-to-year funding.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): I listened to Caroline talking about three years. I know that some people get 12 months or 18 months. The health service will be funded for the rest of our lives. We know that. Sectarianism will not be tackled through a three-year cycle. If you have proved that you have a scheme that will meet a need, why is the funding not effectively open-ended with the checks and balances in the monitoring and evaluation? Rather than say that it is for three years, we could say that it is open-ended but that, when we think you have met the need, we will come to you and give you three, six or nine months' notice so that you can inform your staff and can prepare for the inevitable outcome of success. I do not get it.

Mr Lyttle: Apologies for my delayed arrival today. The Forthspring submission states:

Do you see an action in T:BUC that will deliver that recommendation and/or can you propose how it should be achieved?

Mr Price: It is not evident in T:BUC, no. We do not know what will happen with the negotiations and discussions around the equality and good relations commission, but there is an assumption that that body will not have a lot of those functions and will not have the funding to do it. In the absence of politicians coming up with something whereby it can be transparent and is not all about deals, the best measure at the minute is to have some independent body. There was criticism of the Community Relations Council in the past, but I think that it has performed its function well in the last number of years. It was a good funder to work with through Peace III. It was supportive. It has also reassured people that it has a much more inclusive notion of good relations and community relations. I certainly was one of the critics of what I am very reluctant to refer to as the "community relations industry" or whatever. I think that things have moved on from that. I probably would not look past the Community Relations Council for something that could carry out that function and do it well.

Mr Lyttle: Yet it looks like T:BUC proposes to remove some of those functions from the Community Relations Council, if OFMDFM ever agrees on legislation to bring forward in relation to an equality and good relations commission. That is helpful.

One would like to think that, notwithstanding a complete lack of detail on the proposals, the like of the urban village or the United Youth programme may go towards beginning to address some of the issues that you raised around social and economic infrastructure and interfaces being vital. As organisations on one of the biggest interfaces in Northern Ireland, what has OMFDFM's biggest interaction been with you in relation to the delivery of those types of programmes in your area?

Mr Price: The answer is not a lot at the moment. The value of those types of developments is that, even locally, things have clearly improved with the arrival of the E3 centre at Belfast Metropolitan College. There is the proposed innovation centre from Belfast City Council, but, beyond that, there is nothing really.

Ms R McGlone: Same here. I suppose that I have been to one or two meetings, one recently at Stormont. You were at it, Alex, and I met Alex and Megan there. Prior to that, there has been absolutely no involvement at all, and there has not been any funding and we have not been approached in any way about any of the work that we do.

Ms Murphy: No, we have not. It is a monolith up there. We have not had much interaction.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Do you feel cherished for your expertise?

Ms R McGlone: Certainly not.

Mr Lyttle: I find that pretty surprising. I do not know where to go from there. We obviously have a lot of work to do to try to mobilise the type of expertise that we have on some of those issues in key areas. We continue to do the best that we can to get greater detail in relation to the key proposals that make up the T:BUC strategy. I share your frustration and concern about the lack of detail and lack of interaction around some of those issues.

Ms R McGlone: Chris, we have an opportunity here to sell from the rooftops some of the work that we have done here. Our organisation has been approached to speak at conferences all over the world on different things that we have developed. NI, or the North plc has a real opportunity here. There are some really innovative and brilliant things that have happened here that could be sold abroad, and we are not capitalising on it.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): I think that we are about done, folks. Given that we are gathering evidence for a report, it might be useful for you to tell us what you would like to read as a headline in that report. Maybe Caroline will go first.

Ms Murphy: I would like to see that OFMDFM and the politicians are, for once, in tune with what is actually happening on the ground. Big words, big phrases and big strategies are great, but I would like to see a meeting of minds and actions so that aspirations are translated on the ground. The only way that that can be done is by starting to talk to us on the ground.

Mr Price: The headline that I would like to see is a rewriting of T:BUC, adding an anti-poverty strategy to underpin it.

Mr Terry Donaghy (Suffolk Community Forum): It is worse than we think.

Ms R McGlone: In some senses, I would love to read language that says something to people on the ground.

Mr Maskey: Go for it, Terry. Go ahead. You have been the quiet man here.

Mr Donaghy: It is worse than we think.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): That was a slightly down but maybe realistic, way to finish.

Ms Murphy: You are saying that, and I had that feeling of, "Oh gosh; this sounds very much like woe is us and what is going on?". We need to take away the fact that a lot of stuff needs to be done and a lot of talking needs to be done. A lot of attention needs to be paid to what is happening on the ground and to what good stuff is happening on the ground. What also needs to be taken away is that, yes, we are optimistic. We are knocked for six many times, but we will go on. We would just like somebody to listen and give us a hand to move on more smoothly.

Mr Donaghy: There is a lot of good work being done out there through communities. I have lived in Suffolk for 40 years and, when I grew up in the 1980s, it was bad. I am well in with Suffolk Football Club now, but about 10 years ago, our community was getting smaller and smaller, and we started opening it up to Catholics. There was resistance to it at the start, but now our team is 56% Catholic, and we field two teams.

Ms R McGlone: Are you winning any more?

Mr Donaghy: Yes, we are actually eight points clear at the top of the league. We are looking to go into intermediate football next year. There is work there, but nobody knows that our team is 56% Catholic.

Mr Price: They do now.

Mr Maskey: That is not the headline, by the way. Hansard, take note — do not take note.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): You are also top of the table.

Mr Donaghy: Yes, eight points clear.

Mr Price: That is a pretty good metaphor for sharing.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Absolutely. Young people are getting on with it and are open for it, and that is great. Terry, Caroline, Johnston and Roisin, thank you very much indeed.

Ms Murphy: Thank you for the opportunity.

Mr Price: It was a long 20 minutes.

The Chairperson (Mr Nesbitt): Yes, a political 20 minutes, Johnston.