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OK, well, look, thanks very much, and thank you very much for inviting me here to speak to you today.

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I am going to talk about Northern Ireland, as was mentioned.

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And for those of you who saw the abstract, I took the title for the paper from a poem by Seamus Heaney, which is called the following.

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And it's a poem where he talks about his father ploughing a field and how basically he was just an annoyance to his father.

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And he uses this line in it and says, I was a nuisance tripping, falling, yapping always.

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And then he goes on to say, which is sort of sad in a way as well, he says.

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But today it's my father who keeps stumbling behind me and will not go away.

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And in a sense, he's trying to talk about, I think, the sort of cyclical nature of life.

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But I took that line of sort of tripping, falling and yapping to talk about the peace structures in Northern Ireland in a way,

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as representative of a process where actually quite a lot of ploughing has happened, quite a lot of positive developments have taken place since 1998.

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The violence has decreased dramatically. There have been institutions that have been functional and dysfunctional at different points in time,

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but continually throughout this process, there has been this process of tripping and falling and yapping.

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And the institutions have collapsed at different times, certainly as Brexit has approached.

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They have not really been able to fully hold together some of the underlying tensions that existed before have not been fully addressed.

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So in some ways, I'm going to tell you a little bit of a story of a process that got somewhere, but I don't think fully fulfilled its potential.

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And in some ways, some of those divisions of the past, as in that poem, are sort of re-emerging in this cyclical type of a way.

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So it's a sort of success story, but not a success story.

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It's also quite difficult for me to talk to you today about this because the election is currently unfolding.

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So I might sort of look at my phone in between and correct my talk as I as I go along.

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And so it is quite difficult. But what we do know,

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based on about half of the seats at the moment is it does look like there's a fairly seismic shift happening within the Northern Ireland context.

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And the Sinn Fein, in fact, is now going to emerge as the largest political party rather than the Democratic Unionists.

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I'm not going to go into the history of Northern Ireland.

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I don't have have time, so hopefully you broadly know what I'm talking about, but it's a seismic shift now.

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In some ways we could say that's a success of the peace process that actually the institutions have produced this type of a change.

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But at the same time, for those of us who live there,

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I think there's a real anxiety that because these underlying tensions of not being addressed that in fact,

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the institutions may not hold out, that they may not be reformed post this election, that the DUP might not go back into into government.

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So there's a shift happening again positive. But how will this actually go down?

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Will it actually hold together? So how does this relate to the peace structures?

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Well, what I wanted to firstly note is that there's been an enormous investment in Northern Ireland and investment,

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which for most people working in other contexts. One would only be envious of, of course, there was a massive political investment.

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I'm not going to talk so much about that. I'm going to talk a little bit at the the middle level.

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But at the political level, there was an enormous investment from the British government.

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Tony Blair, for all his failings, paid significant attention to the process, as did Bertie Ahern, as did the United States.

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Probably an example of one of the few processes that I've been involved in that has been successful.

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And there was a large political investment, but at that middle level, there was an even larger investment.

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Over nearly 25 years,

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there's been close to three billion or maybe more euro invested in community based infrastructure and community based programmes.

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Some of that from the Atlantic Philanthropies, from the International Fund for Ireland,

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but a significant amount of it through the EU peace and reconciliation type of programme.

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And we've seen through that programme thousands and thousands of programmes supported.

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If we look at where between 1995 and 1999, 15000 funded projects totalling 730 million,

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just by way of example, 22000 projects funded between 2007 and 2013.

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These included, I suppose, what we typically call people to people peacebuilding work history projects,

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art projects, shared schools, relationship building, dialogue, arts projects and so on and so forth.

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There's a long catalogue of some of the impacts of that. The I've.

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By the International Fund for Ireland, one of the donors talks about creating 55000 jobs through this process,

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you know, 13000 children engaging in shared schooling types of programmes.

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Some of the other donors claim that it's brought people back into the welfare system, for example.

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And as we know at a broad level, yes, violence is definitely decreased.

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Inter-Community connexion is stronger than what it was. What the social surveys show is actually quite interesting, and it was interesting.

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I think John or Tanya, I can't remember, mentioned having patients.

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We can clearly see that attitudes have changed.

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So if you ask people, how have relationships between Catholic and Protestant communities changed the last five years,

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they show a steady increase over the last 20 years, but a very small increase.

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So for those of us who are not very patient, it's quite difficult to see because it's an improvement, but it's quite slow.

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And interestingly, it actually doesn't show that the data does not support this idea that young people dramatically think different to their parents.

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And in fact, because the society remains deeply divided. In fact, when you ask young people about how do they feel about other communities,

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they often actually show more negative views than their parents because they've had no experience of that,

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whereas because of equality legislation and so on and so forth.

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Most adults, in fact, are operating in a mixed workplace, whereas for most children, 93 per cent are still going to schools, which are segregated.

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So it's actually only as an adult that you might have more of a positive experience with the other community.

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So we see attitudinal change, but quite slowly. So what are some of the lessons that we could take from this?

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As I mentioned, some of the successes, but we've also seen really significant tensions over Brexit over the Northern Ireland Protocol,

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a repolarization of politics, which in fact is what has played into the current election, the current election results as well.

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So what are some of the lessons we've learnt from that? I'm going to mention five in terms of piece infrastructure,

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and the first is that there's really been this tension between an institutional

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idea of what peacebuilding is and a relational idea of what peacebuilding is.

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And so if we look at some of those earlier investments that I mentioned, they were very much built around this model of peace by prosperity.

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It was sort of this EU idea that if we just got everybody working and we got everybody, their lives lifted up,

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that somehow these other types of political and inter-community issues would disappear.

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To some degree, that has worked. But to some degree, it hasn't worked.

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We sort of made the very easy realisation that in fact,

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you can be a poor bigot and you can also be a wealthy bigots, and that we see that at times in the polls.

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And so there's been this tension between we just need to uplift the economy versus other models where people are saying,

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well, actually, it's about the relationships, it's about how people relate to one another.

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And we've seen this tension all the way through these infrastructure on this type of issue.

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The second, and it really relate to that,

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is that actually the people to people work that I've talked about being invested in has often actually run on a

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different track to the political track that the two of them have actually often run in quite different sequences.

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So we can show a lot of positive development at community levels.

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It hasn't always moved up if we think about it in terms of the models that John-Paul Liberec was talking about.

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And I think there's a very interesting lesson from Northern Ireland and one of those is that actually

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we invested very heavily in the community relationships in the early days of the peace process.

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We invested very heavily in the political relationship process. We took politicians to South Africa and they met Mandela.

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And I see John, all the boats sitting there played a significant role in a lot of those types of types of visits.

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We actually invested in the relationship building. They got to know each other by the time they signed the agreement.

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Actually, there had been no one was like massive friends, but they got to sort of know each other and there was some connexion.

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We invested in trust. We then set up the institutions and we said, Right, we will invest in communities.

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We'll fix up the relations in communities. Once these institutions are running and everyone's around the table together, it'll work fine.

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And actually, what we've seen over 20 years is that that trust has gone down at the political level.

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Madigan marginally up at the community level, but at the political level, it's gone completely done.

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So we didn't really invest in relationship building at a political level, but we assumed the institutions would somehow take care of that.

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And in fact, when people got down to the real business of where this Northern Ireland belong in the United Kingdom,

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the Republic of Ireland, they realised the differences.

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We're really deep and they got worse at the political level rather than better, even though they were cooperating with each other.

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The third lesson and this, in a sense, comes from the work that Bronya, Kelly and myself have done, and I won't go through it here.

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But we speak about reconciliation in Northern Ireland as having five dimensions.

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The first is building a common vision. The second is dealing with the past.

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The third is actively building relationships. The fourth is attitudinal change.

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And the fifth is social and economic equality or building the sort of economic infrastructures and the peacebuilding.

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And what we've seen in Northern Ireland is really a failure to deal with the top two levels,

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the top two levels of how do we create a vision and how do we deal with the past?

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We've seen an investment in relationship building. We've seen, although in the last five or six years, it's gone backward.

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We've seen some developing the economic infrastructure, but actually it's those top levels.

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And when I say common vision, I don't mean the same political vision. What do we want for our future?

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It's interesting watching the video that Liz put up and being from South Africa,

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I often think of South Africa's exact opposite on those five dimensions. We invested dramatically in political will gin.

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We invested in dealing with the past what will be really bad relationship building and the economy.

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And actually Northern Ireland were stronger on the bottom two than they've been on on the top two.

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But having said that,

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what we failed to really acknowledge is that where the reconciliation work has to happen is in the tensions between those levels.

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In the tension between saying, well, to build an economy, we have to invest in one community and not the other community.

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But we want you to build the relationship with that community at the same time or to create a common vision.

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We have to build a peace process, which means the prisoners are going to come out of jail.

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But at the same time, we want you to also work towards a common vision or build a relationship.

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And I think we fail to see that it's actually the tensions with the relationship where the reconciliation is built,

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rather than a mechanical delivery of relationship building or building our institutions.

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The fourth area and I'll move towards ending is that what we've seen is also very different models of reconciliation operation.

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Our research on a lot of community groups,

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they've tended to often operate on what we call an individual transformation model that you sort of build peace by

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changing individuals and then you bring them into contact with one another and then you build this sort of compact out.

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And because in Northern Ireland, the two levels, the top level in the middle level have not always been connected.

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Actually, those relationship building has not always resulted in a sort of change in the structural or a feeding into the structural,

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whether it's a social justice type issue.

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And then at the top level, we've essentially seen a very thin model of reconciliation, reconciliation, essentially coexistence.

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As long as the political parties are talking with each other, stuff's going on.

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You walk down one side of the street, I walk down one side of the street and so we'll coexist.

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But actually, it hasn't really been enough to fully cement this peace process.

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So we've seen these different models operating with each other. The fifth area where I think we have lessons to learn from.

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It was interesting because John Paul and Tanya mentioned them as well is that

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we've often seen a very desegregated approach to how we fund peacebuilding.

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And it's really they both used the word NGO ization. I use the word projective ization.

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We turned the world into a series of projects. And so how do we measure the peace programme?

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The numbers I gave you there actually had to do one of those evaluations,

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so I started working on the evaluation, said how many projects we got to evaluate 15000.

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And can you summarise that into a full page statement for the EU?

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So what we've done is we've project devised it, and the result of that has been if we think of young people,

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for example, their projects for young people are seen as victims. So if they lost a parent, they're part of a trauma programme, a victims programme.

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Then this programme for young people at risk, young people who are maybe at risk because of antisocial behaviour or drugs.

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Or then there's programmes for those who might be under threat from paramilitary type organisations,

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but actually, you don't necessarily see programmes which try to bring all three of those things together.

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And so by funding at the rate that we did, we often ended up splitting the work rather than looking at it collectively.

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So where does this leave us? And I will end on this, and there's so much more that I could say.

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A quick couple of lessons or recommendations from it. Firstly, for me,

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I think what we've learnt is that actually relationships matter at all levels of the peace process and particularly in divided societies.

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So building a road is never building a road in Northern Ireland.

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It's like, who benefits from that drug demons or demons? So it's always a relationship dimension.

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And I think, as I've said, a.

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I think we invested at the community level, but we sort of failed over time to fully invested that relationship to play well at the political level,

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and that's quite hard because politicians don't really want you to sort of say, we want to build trust between you, blah blah blah.

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The second is and John Paul said this actually, I used different words.

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I said that you need to fund an interconnected process over a long time, at least 20 years.

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It's just quite interesting what you said. Perhaps we need to fund an interconnected web of environment process.

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Over 20 years, the EU funded the peace process for 25 years.

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And they funded it in five year tranches that often didn't always overlap.

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If we'd sit out at the beginning and said, let's fund a 25 year process, it would have looked completely different today.

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The final two two points is that some of the institutions do matter.

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So we've had a Community Relations Council and Equality Commission, the Human Rights Council, and it's interesting.

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As the political trust has decreased in Northern Ireland, we've actually seen a tailing off of investment in some of those institutions

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that were supported during during the peace process and perhaps my final well,

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my final recommendation is that we also do need to get the conceptual right.

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And I think that the failure to really say, what do we mean by reconciliation in Northern Ireland?

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This is just coexistence.

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Is it a deeper emotional change and the failure to really understand what we even mean by peace and at the moment within the peacebuilding area,

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the failure to really connect that with environmental change, with economic degradation,

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with the welfare system, with social justice questions is a big unanswered question.

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So I think we do have to also get sometimes the conceptual issues right.

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So I hope that that gives you some insight and thank you very much for listening to.