Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): I welcome Orla McStravick, grade 5 in the race relations and integration division in TEO; Julie Cuming, the head of migration and integration in the policy branch; and Peter McCusker, head of race relations in the legislation branch. Thank you for attending. I invite you to make your opening remarks.

Mrs Orla McStravick (The Executive Office): Good afternoon, Chair and Committee members. Thank you for the opportunity to provide you with a briefing on the Department's work on race relations and integration. Chair, you mentioned that I am joined by Julie and Peter.

Members will have received the briefing paper. It outlines the key areas of work in this area that are being progressed in the Department, so I intend to provide just a brief overview of some of those, with a view to leaving the majority of time for discussion and questions.

First, it is important to acknowledge the challenging context with the increasing incidence of racially motivated hate and crime and ongoing discontent across our communities. As was mentioned in the previous session, we witnessed, in the past two summers, significant periods of violence and disorder. That is something that Ministers and the Executive collectively have condemned repeatedly, but it brings into focus the importance of work to identify and understand the root causes of hate and racism and to develop interventions to tackle those. That is not without its challenges. It will require long-term work, collectively, with partners and wider society to support a change in attitudes and behaviours.

A truly joined-up approach was something that proved effective in the immediate response to the violence and disorder that we witnessed in Ballymena and beyond, and the structures that were established facilitated essential situational awareness, identification of issues and early action to address and stop the violence reasonably quickly. However, we do, of course, recognise that that was only a first step. We have, therefore, retained the structures, with TEO now leading the community cohesion group, which is focused on community confidence, root causes and communications. We are working to develop a suite of interventions, which will be considered by Ministers and will inform and help to deliver a new strategic approach to racial equality beyond 2025.

The development of that has been a key focus of our work. It will build on the current strategy, and the intention is to adopt a public health approach to intervention design. We have had significant engagement to date, including a visioning day with the racial equality subgroup; workshops with the Travellers and Roma thematic groups; a public call for views; and targeted research with wider society, community organisations and statutory bodies. We have developed a draft framework that has been shared with Departments and the racial equality subgroup. It will be considered by Ministers, and, subject to ministerial agreement, we intend to commence a 12-week public consultation before the end of the year. We will bring that to the Committee in advance for its views.

Oversight of both those areas of work has been integrated into the strategic planning group (SPG), which now encompasses all race relations work. Alongside that, and in line with commitments in the current racial equality strategy, work is ongoing to strengthen race relations legislation. Following the review of the Race Relations (Northern Ireland) Order 1997, an analysis report was published in August 2024, following a 12-week consultation. It proposes over 70 amendments across key areas, including education, employment, service provision, enforcement and the role of the Equality Commission. Ministers are considering draft legislative proposals with a view to revised legislation being introduced to the Assembly and completed in the current mandate.

The Executive agreed and published a refugee integration strategy and delivery framework in May this year, and work has been ongoing through the tactical delivery group (TDG) and the strategic planning group to progress a number of key priorities in line with the approach to delivery as set out in the plan. Those include establishing resource hubs in council areas, conducting a skills and employment survey, extending regional immigration advice provision until March 2026, and enhancing communications and public awareness.

As for funding and programmes to enhance race relations, the minority ethnic development fund (MEDF) continues to support 31 groups with an annual allocation of about £1·1 million. The crisis fund is delivered in partnership with the British Red Cross and provides emergency support to those at risk of destitution with an annual allocation £182,000. The district council good relations programme has allocated £2·46 million in 2025-26, including £218,000 for targeted cohesion initiatives, and the Communities in Transition programme is delivering 35 projects focusing on paramilitarism and resilience with a budget of £2·9 million.

On agreement of a new strategic approach to racial equality, work will be progressed to consider the MEDF and approach to funding to ensure that we maximise its use, aligned with the new framework. We are also keen to exploit opportunities to deliver collective interventions under a range of strategies or frameworks that support enhanced race relations for all.

I could go through all the areas in the briefing paper, but it may be better to pause at this point, because I want to allow time for discussion and questions. However, in closing, I reiterate the Department's commitment to fostering a society that is fair, inclusive and cohesive, where individuals of all backgrounds feel safe, respected and empowered to reach their full potential. We recognise the scale and complexity of the challenges ahead, accept that it is not going to be easy, and welcome any input from members to inform priorities in this area. I am happy to pass over for discussion and questions.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Your paper refers to coordinating support and services for those in contingency accommodation and facilitating the allocation of asylum dispersal funding received annually from the Home Office. Will you speak to the dispersal funding? I was at a women's centre on Friday, and they said that the centre received some of that funding in the past, which was useful for the work that they do, particularly in south Belfast. That funding stopped, and I think that there was a lack of transparency around that. I do not have all the details. Will you talk to how much funding you get, and how you are open, transparent and accountable in how you allocate that?

Mrs McStravick: The full dispersal funding is provided by the Home Office to support the dispersal of asylum seekers locally. The amount that we get annually varies. At the start of the year, we do not always know exactly how much we are going to get, because some of it is reliant on the number of asylum seekers who may be here and other criteria that the Home Office applies. The amount can vary slightly year-on-year. At the start of the year, we have to work out how much we expect to get.

All funding allocations are brought to the strategic planning group for agreement, and all Departments and agencies are represented on that group. We do quite a bit of work with Departments in advance to identify the collective needs, what we are trying to achieve and where we should therefore prioritise funding. TEO does not retain all of the full dispersal funding. Some may go to other Departments, depending on needs and what is agreed. Historically, the funding that we retained was used to provide allocations to councils for them to develop support locally. That is probably where the funding that you talked about came from. It has potentially come through the council rather than from TEO directly.

This year, as I mentioned, under the refugee integration strategy, we are trying to progress the hubs. TEO will use the full dispersal funding that it retains this year to support that, because we are very keen to have some sort of hubs right across the council areas to support people who need advice, signposting and information. Historically, councils have provided money to groups in the voluntary and community sector, which are well placed to provide some of the services and meet some of the needs locally. They report back to us on how they used that money. Equally, we provide updates to the strategic planning group on how the money has been utilised year-on-year. This year, the funding that we will retain is primarily for the council hubs, and an element will go towards regional immigration advice to ensure that that can be provided regionally for all who need it.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): That all rings a bell because of the conversations that I had on Friday. I know that the family support hubs are not necessarily the type of hubs that you are talking about, but, while those hubs receive funding from the council for supporting families who are destitute and have no recourse to public funds, no provision for the admin or other background financial management costs ever comes with it. Basically, they get a lump sum, which all has to go out the door, and it takes a lot of effort to identify the proper families and to work with them. Those families might have other complex needs, and there may be language barriers and so on. There is such an onus on the very bottom level of community infrastructure of those dispersal hubs. They just are not given enough money to do it in a way that is manageable.

Mrs McStravick: Yes. Different things have operated in different council areas over time, so we are keen to develop that model. It will not be exactly the same in every council area, nor should it, because the hubs may need to flex and be agile in order to meet individual needs. However, the model would create a minimum-quality level.

The councils put out the funding and manage that process, but we can certainly engage on that issue through the council engagement group —

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): Please do.

Mrs McStravick: — and as part of the process to develop that model, so that we reinforce that message around some of the challenges that there might be for local delivery organisations. We have a limited amount of money.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): I appreciate that.

Mrs McStravick: It comes from what we can get.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): It was not necessarily a moan. It was more a case of us wanting to be able to support families. However, when you have one person who works less than full-time, and other things have to be done —.

Mrs McStravick: We can certainly factor that into the discussions that we are having at the minute about how the model will be shaped and what it should look like.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): OK. Thank you. Sorry, I do not want to labour that point too much.

Based on your presentation, we have the strategic planning group, the tactical delivery group and the community cohesion group. There are a lot of layers. I do not mean to be flippant, but it almost sounds like busywork: everybody is busy going to meetings to talk about stuff. Are there too many structures?

Mrs McStravick: Towards the end of the year, we will look in the longer term at those structures, particularly because race relations work and refugees and asylum work were brought together in the Department, and the structures came with those.

The SPG provides strategic oversight, so it is quite high level. It meets quarterly, because it is there to be the decision maker and to task the tactical delivery group, which is more operational.

The community cohesion group came from a key lesson learned from the previous unrest in summer 2024. It was right that the PSNI led the initial response when we were in response mode and when there was immediacy around the unrest. However, as we moved out of that mode and into the situation where the violence had settled but we still were seeing unrest, we recognised that we needed to retain the collectiveness of that action in order to look at how to do preventative intervention work, which is longer term in nature. Therefore, we retained that structure but aligned it under the SPG, so that it can give oversight.

The group has a very clear focus. It links in with other groups, and some of its members cut across those, in that some tactical delivery group members will be members of the community cohesion group. It develops interventions by asking, "What are the key things that we can do in the medium to longer term to see what some of the concerns, issues and root causes are, and how can we develop things to tackle those?". A much wider range of partners are around that table, as they have come directly from the strategic coordination group that the PSNI set up.

We felt that, when we previously had those structures in 2024, we lost a bit of momentum around the issue when we went back to business as usual. We formed the community cohesion group specifically to maintain that momentum. I would not say that there is no need for it; there most definitely is. In the longer term, however, there is a need to look at the structures. There are a lot of them, and they may well be needed now, but we might be able to streamline them in the longer term.

Some of that work will have a lifespan at a point in time, given the immediacy of some of it, and it may then move more into the structures that we already have in place. We will look at that, however.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): I have remembered something that I want to ask another quick question about. The 2005-2010 strategy talked about ethnic equality monitoring forming part of the new race relations order. Will that feature?

Mrs McStravick: We have reviewed our legislation and compared it with that elsewhere. We worked extensively with the Departmental Solicitor's Office on that. Ministers are considering proposals for potential amendments to the Race Relations Order (RRO), so it will be subject to that. We have been doing quite a lot of work in the interim with Departments, and, in particular, we have been able to do some work in the ethnic equality monitoring space with them to identify what data they have already or could have, how they are using the data, where there are gaps and where there is additional data that they could collect.

We also did a bit of work on Citizen Space so that, when Departments go out to consult, there is an easy way for them to ask the ethnic equality monitoring questions. Therefore, whilst there might be a need for an element of legislation at a later stage, quite a lot of work is being done in the meantime. That takes some time, because even with some of the things that Departments have been able to do, such as collecting data from schools' perspectives, it will be seven years before they have a complete picture of a school. We are working in parallel with Departments on that, but Ministers are considering the proposals for anything that is under the RRO.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): I will come back to that when we get to scrutinise it.

Mr Dickson: Thank you for being here today. TEO is the right place for this work to be done, but race relations and refugee strategies are, perhaps, at the opposite ends of your activity spans. Race relations are immediate but also very long term, whereas a refugee strategy is very of the moment and, as you admitted, very dependent on what the UK Government give you, because you have no discretion over the funds that you get. I am interested to know what discretion you have in how you spend that money. I would also like to know what coordination TEO has with all the other Departments. How do you interact with the Ministers in the other Departments? Do you ask them to tell you what they are doing, or do you tell them what to do? How is that coordinated? I have a couple of other questions, but maybe we could deal with that bit first.

Mrs McStravick: Yes. Any money that we get for the spend, whether it is from the Home Office or the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), comes via a memorandum of understanding (MOU). We get a range of funding, whether it is for the Syrian scheme, the Ukrainian scheme or for full dispersal, but it has to be used for those cohorts. In saying that, we have flexibility in how we do that, and that is where we work very closely with Departments. Some schemes have specific elements that you have to deliver. For example, for the Ukraine scheme, we have to administer thank-you payments, and there are home visits and things that we have to do to check accommodation. There are some mandatory elements of that scheme. For the wider funding, however, we work through the TDG and strategic planning group to agree how best to utilise the money. A lot of work is done with Departments. We had funding workshops at which we sat down and said, "What are the needs?". Rather than asking who needs what, we asked what the actual needs are, what we are trying to do and how best to utilise the money in order to do that. Those proposals then go to the SPG for allocation. We are limited in how we can use the money in terms of who the beneficiaries are; equally, however, there is an element of flexibility in how we choose to spend it to meet the needs of people who are here under the various schemes.

Mr Dickson: Do you have some coordination with local authorities in England and Wales to consider what best practice might look at?

Mrs McStravick: Absolutely. We have a weekly meeting with the Home Office and MHCLG that the other Administrations sit in on at which we go through upcoming changes and things that are coming down the line and at what they are doing. It is structurally very different here compared with other areas in that they talk about local authorities rather than Departments, but yes, we have that engagement.

Mr Dickson: You indicated, and we are aware of this, that there is potential for a racial equality Bill to be brought forward.

Mrs McStravick: That would be updated legislation with regard to the Race Relations Order.

Mr Dickson: Yes. Without giving your secrets away — maybe you do not have any — what might be the key improvements or changes that you would want to deliver in that legislation?

Mrs McStravick: The commitment to look at the Race Relations Order was to bring it on a par with other legislation in GB and Ireland. We carried out a public consultation and published the analysis on the TEO website. About 70 potential areas would be covered, but they would be subject to ministerial and Executive consideration and to the drafting process with the Office of the Legislative Counsel (OLC). We will also work quite closely with the Departmental Solicitor's Office on that. Peter, the areas range from education and employment, but I cannot think of the others.

Mr Peter McCusker (The Executive Office): The provision of goods, facilities and services, the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland and enforcement.

Mrs McStravick: Part of the work on enforcement.

Mr Dickson: In a sense, therefore, does that go back to the coordination with all the Departments?

Mrs McStravick: Yes.

Mr Dickson: Finally, what is your relationship like with the local authorities in Northern Ireland on the good relations programme? How is that monitored? How do you satisfy yourselves that you are getting value for money from your contribution to those programmes in local government?

Mrs McStravick: With the local councils?

Mr Dickson: Yes.

Mrs McStravick: I do not manage the wider good relations funding, but we do the full dispersal funding to councils. When we had the Ukrainian arrivals and, equally, in the response to the unrest, we recognised the role that councils can play in this matter given that they are closer to the ground than we are and work very closely with a range of voluntary and community sector organisations. We have an MOU in place with councils, and we have a council engagement group through which we bring all the councils together to share best practice and lessons learned and to try to identify areas where we might do things that make best use of the money. In the longer term, there is very much an appetite, both in councils and under the like of the MEDF, to see how we can better align the wider good relations work and our work in order to have common outcomes. We are all trying to achieve good relations; it is all in the same space, and councils are very keen on that so that we can have a more effective and streamlined approach both to funding and to what councils are trying to deliver locally in that wider good relations space. Therefore, we will work very closely on that with our good relations colleagues in the Department.

Mr Dickson: Thank you.

Mr Gaston: I will pick up on some of the comments that I made earlier. I am looking at the refugee integration strategy, where we have 11 pages, and five of them are fully covered with photographs, so that leaves six pages. I have seen what has happened in Ballymena, and I see nothing in the strategy that would stop it happening again. I see nothing that would change what has happened. If you are really going to try to address the issues in Ballymena, you would look at what has happened over a number of years. The Executive Office and the Executive have to take responsibility for how we have arrived at this point.

For example, Clonavon is known as G3. The census figures show that 52% of those living in G3 arrived between 2011 and 2021, so the community in that small area has transformed. It was highly populated by the Roma, and people have tried for years to integrate and to get the Roma to integrate with us, but that simply did not happen. We in Ballymena have experienced a community coming in and setting up in a small area and there has been zero integration.

To put it into context, there are 1,529 Roma in Northern Ireland, and 740 of those people are in North Antrim. Yes, North Antrim is bigger than Ballymena, but a high proportion of those people are in Ballymena alone. If we want to do something to help that situation, we have to look at the integration piece for the people who are coming into Northern Ireland. The document does not touch on this at all, but it is not an issue with asylum seekers. It is about economic migrants who have moved to Ballymena, and a number of them have illegally crossed the border and set up crime gangs in the area. There are prostitution and drug houses on the doorstep of the police station.

For years, that was allowed to fester, and that is why Ballymena erupted in the way that it did. Essentially, I am looking at this document for comfort, and I know that it happened in May 2025, so when we go for draft number two, how will the Executive Office ensure that it does not happen again? I am talking not just about Ballymena; I am talking about any town in Northern Ireland.

Mrs McStravick: We take your point. The refugee integration strategy is for those who are here seeking international protection rather than for economic migrants per se. However, leaving that aside, the communication point is one that we are very alive to. We are looking at data, so, for example, the census data gives us information about who is here and in what areas and where there might be the potential for underlying tensions or community cohesion issues. The community cohesion group will specifically look not just at developing those interventions to tackle community cohesion issues but at where we actually need to target those interventions to meet the needs of communities and everybody in communities. Although you may not see anything specific in what is a refugee integration strategy, we are working, through that community cohesion group, to look at how we tackle and deal with those root causes and issues and at where we target interventions to meet the needs and to try to facilitate that community cohesion piece.

Mr Gaston: Ballymena is a welcoming town. It has shown that for years. Our industry and economy depend on economic migration and people coming in.

Mrs McStravick: Absolutely.

Mr Gaston: Some of the biggest factories in Northern Ireland exist in Ballymena, and we depend on foreign skilled labour coming in, but the problem has been, once again, where a community has come into Ballymena but has had no intention of integrating into the area. The last page of the document states:

However, what we have seen in Ballymena, essentially, is immigration without assimilation, which I would say is an invasion. There has been no assimilation and no integration, an area has been taken over and the small number of local people who have lived there all their lives have been largely forgotten about. You mentioned that you worked to bring the violence in Ballymena to an end. What did the Executive Office do? I was on the ground for the majority of those days. It was happening very close to my office, and I could not tell you one thing that the Executive Office was doing on the ground.

Mrs McStravick: We in the Executive Office do not really have a remit for that, but the office was very much part and parcel of the structures that were established. We fed into the situational awareness of what was happening on the ground. We have community groups that we know are working on the ground, and we were in daily contact with them to understand what was happening. We fed that into the strategic coordination group alongside a whole range of other partners, including, for example, councils and the PSNI. We are not the police. We are not the ones who will be out there doing things on the ground, but it was very important that we were aware of what was happening from the people who were on the ground, feeding that in and helping to inform that group about what needed to be done, what priorities needed to be tackled to end the violence and what we needed to do to support anybody that had been impacted. We played our part in that. Whilst we may not necessarily have been there on the ground, I went to Ballymena to meet with some of the community groups to get a sense of what was happening.

With regard to our departmental remit, I know that our good relations colleagues and Ministers were able to give some additional funding to councils to assist with the unrest that we had seen and tackle issues that were associated with that. We were very much part and parcel of the structures and were, collectively, trying to understand the issues and look at what was needed to address them.

Mr Gaston: From a Ballymena perspective, I struggle to see the outcomes of that. I believe that the council is bringing forward its report on the next steps in the next couple of weeks. We are now mid-November, and this happened in June. The build-up to it was allowed to happen for months and years. It seemed that, once the violence stopped, the necessity and the want to help started to dwindle. It is sad that it took that to bring people from statutory agencies to the table to say, "No, listen, things are bubbling over, there is a tinderbox in Ballymena and we need to do something about it." The violence was wrong, but it was allowed to happen and allowed to happen for years. The Committee's racial equality and refugee integration briefing paper basically drags the name of Ballymena through the mud — it makes slurs against my home town and bandies about the idea that it is racist. Yes, an element of the violence was wrong and should not have happened — absolutely — but to put it all down to racism is wrong, and labelling people as being far right is wrong.

Mrs McStravick: I disagree that the paper says that, to be fair. We recognise that there was violence in Ballymena and beyond, and we recognise that there had been violence the year before in Belfast, including in South Belfast and beyond, so the paper is certainly not intended to criticise Ballymena in any way. It is factual that there was unrest that started in Ballymena and spread beyond. I do not agree that the paper is criticising Ballymena per se. It is noting that that happened.

You made a point about the structures being there, the immediacy then being over and what would happen beyond that. Although the civil contingency structures were stood down, we asked to retain the community cohesion group so that we could make sure that people collectively stay focused on the issue in order to allow us to develop the interventions to try to prevent or mitigate the risks of these things happening again, not necessarily in Ballymena but anywhere across Northern Ireland, because we are very aware of the fact that it could happen again. That is not what anybody wants. The whole point of retaining the community cohesion group and keeping partners around the table is to be able to work on that collectively and not go back to business as usual where people take a step back.

Mr Gaston: Where can I learn about what that group is doing? Where can I learn about the outcomes of that group's work? I stood in Ballymena in the early hours of the Tuesday morning. We hear about the millions of pounds that are being spent on integration and on different things by the Stormont Executive — it is not simply a Westminster issue — but I thought, "Why has my community completely missed out on that?". Nothing has come to Ballymena that has made a difference and transformed the area.

Mrs McStravick: Immigration policy is not devolved. How the people arrive here and the permissions by which they arrive here and when is not a devolved matter, and we have no control over that. The intention is that the community cohesion group will provide proposals to Ministers that say, "Here is a first suite of interventions that we think would help tackle the community cohesion issues that we are seeing not just in Ballymena but across the board". Ministers will want time to consider those. They will be developed collectively by that group, and all partners will be around the table to make sure that we are all focused on what needs to be done. Ministers will have to have time to consider the proposals, and then you will see the outworkings.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): You can make a small point, because Carál still needs to come in.

Mr Gaston: I have a final comment. When it was totalled up, there was £5·5 million for this year in the Stormont Budget to look at integration and all issues connected to immigration. I certainly feel that that has not been put to best use. I was standing on the streets of Ballymena in the early hours of the Tuesday morning, and I felt that that community had been forgotten about. The Executive and all the other statutory agencies have to feed in and take some responsibility. When people raised concerns, others put their fingers in their ears and ignored them until the situation got to boiling point. I do not want that happening in my community again. It is important that we work on these issues. I am glad that the structures are still in place, and I acknowledge that.

Mrs McStravick: We are engaged on a key piece of work. We have commissioned innovation consultancy services in DOF to look at a piece of work. It will be a pilot at the start, but it will engage with wider communities to better understand the concerns and issues. We very much encourage communities to engage with us. I know that there is sometimes a bit of resistance to that, but we very much want to hear from everybody across communities to understand properly what the issues and concerns are so that they can help shape what we are trying to do in this space. Julie, do you want to come in?

Mr Gaston: On that point, I look forward to my invitation to feed into that.

Mrs McStravick: We are happy to pick up separately with anybody.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): There are a few more items to get through. Do you want to respond before I bring in Carál?

Mrs Julie Cuming (The Executive Office): I reassure the member that, when we talk about communication, we are talking about working not only with the ethnic minority community. Of course, that is hugely important, and we need to do that, but we need to look at interventions that we can make with the majority community — we are doing that — because we have to hear people's fears and concerns if we are going to tackle the root causes of the issues that we have been facing. It will never solve anything if we start dividing and looking at only one part of a community. We want to look at the community holistically and at what we can do in our communities to build that cohesion and make them strong, sustainable communities where everybody works together for the good of that community.

I know that that sounds a bit altruistic, but we cannot do this if we are working only with minority ethnic groups. We have to work with the groups that you talk about and the experiences that you had. We will present those real fears and concerns. You mentioned Clonavon. I know the area, and we need to work with everyone to understand the problems and the interventions that we can put in place to break down those fears and have people working together. We do not want to have anti-racism-type initiatives; we want to have the types of initiatives in which we build together.

Ms Ní Chuilín: I apologise. I had to take a call, so I missed some of your presentation. However, I have read the papers.

I understand that money goes from TEO to local government.

Mrs McStravick: It goes to councils, yes.

Ms Ní Chuilín: How much money is that, and has every council drawn it down?

Mrs McStravick: Good relations money goes to councils through the district councils good relations fund. What we have provided to councils has been under the full dispersal funding, so it is the money that we get from the Home Office.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Has every council availed itself of those funds?

Mrs McStravick: Yes, they have.

Mrs Cuming: They will be —. Yes, they have.

Mrs McStravick: They have previously, and we are working with councils on the funding that we have for this year to provide to them.

Ms Ní Chuilín: OK. You talked about going to DOF for consultancy. What is that consultancy for?

Mrs McStravick: That concerns an area in DOF that provides internal consultancy for the Civil Service and what we want to do. The pilot will be in South Belfast. They will be engaging on our behalf with a range of statutory bodies, and we are trying to engage communities where we saw issues arising, particularly in 2024. We want to understand what the concerns, issues and root causes are so that that can inform what we do in this space.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Are they DOF officials or private consultants?

Mrs McStravick: It is part of DOF, so they are DOF officials. It is just the branch that that area is called, so it is not going out to external consultants.

Ms Ní Chuilín: I am just concerned about the number of consultants that the Department uses.

Mrs McStravick: No. This is internal to the Civil Service.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Focus groups directly engage with children and young people. You mentioned that TEO commissioned the Education Authority (EA). What does that mean?

Mrs McStravick: That is for the work that we will be doing. We have developed a draft framework for race relations that will basically build on the racial equality strategy, which ends this year. We will move to public consultation on that, subject to ministerial consideration of the draft framework. As part of that, we want to do specific consultation with children and young people, and we are working with the Education Authority to see how we can engage with children and young people in the school context. We are very mindful that children and young people can get caught up in violence and the things that we see on social media and all the rest of it, so we want to do a bit of targeted engagement as part of the consultation with children and young people. That is what that refers to.

Ms Ní Chuilín: It is just that the EA is not on the street.

Mrs McStravick: Yes, we will be doing wider consultation. That is just one area.

Ms Ní Chuilín: I just want to make a point. Absolutely, there is a role for the EA, but, in talking to children who are minority ethnic as well as to children from right across the community, you will find that youth services and faith-based groups or whatever are working with them.

Mrs McStravick: I am going to something in the next couple of weeks with a group of young people. It is in Girdwood —

Ms Ní Chuilín: It probably is.

Mrs McStravick: — in a couple of weeks' time; it is on one of the evenings. That is an opportunity for us to listen to and hear what children and young people are saying.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Is that the strategy?

Mrs McStravick: It will be the new framework for race relations, so it will be basically when the current racial equality strategy ends. This will be what comes after that.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Are there plans for any legislation?

Mrs McStravick: The legislation will come under the Race Relations Order. One of the commitments in the current racial equality strategy is to review the Race Relations Order and to look at where there are gaps between it and other legislation. Policy proposals are with Ministers on the back of a consultation on that on any enhancements that might be made to the Race Relations Order. However, that will need to go to the Executive and then, obviously, through the process with OLC and introduction.

Ms Ní Chuilín: When do you anticipate that that will happen?

Mrs McStravick: It is on the legislative programme for this mandate, so the intention is to deal with it in this mandate.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): OK? Does anyone else want to ask questions? No. Thank you very much for your clarifications and attendance.

Mrs McStravick: Thank you.