‘Two-thirds with conflict convictions still jobless’

TWO thirds of ex-prisoners with conflict-related convictions are still unemployed 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, an academic has said.

Their family members have also been black-listed by some employers as an inter-generational legacy of the years of violence, Professor Peter Shirlow added.

A wide-ranging bid to persuade employers and service-providers to rethink their misgivings known as the Open Doors project has received a €1.6m funding boost from the EU.

Prof Shirlow, from the University of Liverpool, said: “Conflict-related prisoners are still excluded through law. Over those 20 years more people have failed to get work because they have been vetted.

“We are living in a society which is supposed to have gone through a peace process in which a significant section of our society have not been brought into full citizenship.

“That is a social injustice, it is a social wrong and it is something which completely contradicts the whole idea of and for a peace process, which has to be about the inclusion of all people within society because exclusion is the cause of conflict.”

Peter Sheridan, chief executive of the peace-building charity Co-operation Ireland, added that ex-prisoners had a key role to play in ending continuing paramilitarism.