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Platform: EU must not forget young people of Northern Ireland

Our Future Our Choice NI, a cross-community youth group, travelled yesterday to Brussels to meet with Michel Barnier to discuss Brexit issues and the future of young people in Northern Ireland

Doire Finn, Our Future Our Choice NI
Doire Finn, Our Future Our Choice NI Doire Finn, Our Future Our Choice NI

As a young person from a rural border community in Northern Ireland, it’s not always easy to meet powerful decision makers.

But yesterday was different. Yesterday afternoon I met with Michel Barnier in Brussels. My message for him was clear: the futures of young people in Northern Ireland are not bargaining chips in some political game being played out in Westminster.

I was joined by fellow campaigners from Our Future Our Choice NI, a movement pushing for a people’s vote. As children of the peace process, we’ve grown up without the fear of violence that our parents and grandparents knew all too well - the first generation free from that fear, and for that I am thankful.

It’s critical that the EU’s chief negotiator hears the voices of young people in Northern Ireland. The news that Theresa May desperately continues to seek concessions on the backstop alarms many in my community. For us, the backstop is non-negotiable. Any changes now risk jeopardising the integrity and spirit of the Good Friday Agreement.

We have been campaigning tirelessly over the past six months to ensure leaders on both sides of the channel stand firm to their commitment to my generation. They must honour their promise on the backstop. We are grateful and proud of our EU friends for standing with us in a process fraught by division and fear, but still the sole guarantee of peace on our island remains under threat.

All the while, we wait for a Westminster Parliament to approve or reject a deal which leaves us poorer, with less control and with absolutely no clarity or closure about what our future relationship with the EU will look like.

Where are our representatives? Where are the politicians who can stand up for the overwhelming majority of young people in Northern Ireland, who didn’t give their consent to these botched negotiations and this terrible deal, and who worry about their futures and long for somebody to speak up for them?

They are nowhere. Young people in Northern Ireland are suffering the greatest democratic deficit in the UK, if not in most of Europe. Our politicians either don’t sit, or they don’t represent us. Sinn Fein don’t take their seats, which leaves the DUP – who support a hard Brexit which would be completely intolerable for us - as our sole voice in Parliament. In Belfast, Stormont has now broken records, making it the world’s longest suspended assembly. Young people are among the worst victims of this, lacking a voice in a process which stands to disproportionately affect us and our futures.

So we asked Barnier to hold firm. We need EU leaders to not forget the young people of Northern Ireland. We need them to honour the backstop in its current form. And we need them to help give a voice to the young people of Northern Ireland who, for far too long, have lacked any real political representation. As the impasse continues and May’s deal comes closer to its final death, our campaign will continue to call for the best way to protect our futures and the only route left out of the mess: a people’s vote.

I live on the border. I see people and goods passing each day past memorials for those who lost their lives. I am part of a community that mourns them still and savours our peace. Young people here have an understanding of the past which politicians in Westminster seem either to forget or to ignore. We hope that Michel Barnier continues to listen to the concerns of the young people who have nobody else to turn to and nobody but ourselves to speak on our behalf.