‘It gives us the chance to engage across a table, not a peace wall’

commonplace and children who attend integrated schools are a social anomaly.

We still live in a world where paramilitary control masquerades as community safeguarding and where the victims of our history are begging just to get by.

We have been gifted the legi slative mechanisms to tear down the barriers of our past, unshackle ourselves from the chains of sectarianism and right the wrongs of the past. The door to societal integration has been opened and we have failed to step through.

The Good Friday Agreement isn’t dead because it was never alive. It was the people of Northern Ireland who have taken us this far. By calling out the faults of the Agreement we do not absolve ourselves from the responsibility of writing our own instruction manual. Resting on the laurels of a 20-year-old mediation will not create the future that I believe is possible.

I appeared on The Top Table on BBC NI last May, days before the General Election.

Despite that programme airing less than a year ago, political fatigue has rendered it a hazy recollection. Since then, many more young people have been given the chance to appear on the show.

The Good Friday Agreement shows its influence, not under the lights of a studio, but amongst the young people on the panel, and indeed the audience.

I have watched these panel- lists laughing, joking and becoming friends backstage, before taking their seats at The Top Table and enjoying a battle of political debate.

Notwithstanding this progress, I have also witnessed some hateful abuse plaguing social media, berating young panellists for either regurgitating the politics of their parents or abandoning their roots; for being too reactionary, or perhaps too progressive. It is disap- pointing that some would hide behind a keyboard and criticise young panellists on the show as if they were nothing more than one- dimensional caricatures who are so immature that their political beliefs characterise their entire existence. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Stephen Nolan’s The Top Table show is giving young people the chance to engage, across a table rather than across a peace wall, in the debates which dominate their existence.

It is a huge privilege for me to now work on the show and play my part in offering hundreds of young people the chance to prove to the world that they are passionate, that they can present solutions and that they have a vision for Northern Ireland which is ambitious and inclusive.

Whatever the future might hold, unionism will not evaporate in a United Ireland, and nationalism will not be quelled in a province of the United Kingdom.

As ever, the journey is more important than the destination, and more important still is that we travel together.

❝ I have witnessed some hateful abuse on social media, berating young panellists for their views