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Dave Anderson MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, speaking at the Labour Party Conference 2016, said:

Conference, I am glad to be here in Liverpool with my Shadow Northern Ireland team Stephen Pound, Tommy McEvoy and Judith Cummings. They are a team of both talent and experience and I have every confidence in their ability to make Northern Ireland a better place.  

I speak for the entire Labour team in thanking Vernon Coaker for the years of great work he has done in Northern Ireland.

We in the Labour Party can take great pride in the work we did in building peace, stability and prosperity in Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland has come a long way since I first got involved in the Peace process in the 90s with the Trade Union movement, when we worked hard to help deliver the peace process and coined the phrase, “We are a non-partisan agent for change.”

It is that phrase that has and will guide my work in Northern Ireland.

Make no mistake comrades, our Party – indeed our movement - transformed lives of the people on both sides of the Irish Sea in the moves to peace.  

The role played by great women like Mo Mowlam at a national level, Hilary Clinton at an international level and Inez McCormack, a Union Leader in Northern Ireland, was a model of how to engage and how to convince people to move back from the brink.

It was no overstatement last week at the TUC in Brighton when Peter Bunting, the soon to be retired General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, stated that “The trade unions in Ireland prevented the Troubles turning into an all-out civil war”.

He was right and it’s that legacy that we have inherited and have to live up to today.

We have to get back to what we do best and make the moral case for genuine social justice. And if we get it right we can start turning back the tide of insecure work, high unemployment, an education system failing young people, a stark reality that since 1998 more people have died from suicide than we lost throughout the Troubles.

I do not want to paint a picture of despair in Northern Ireland.  It is a great place to live and work, and its people are the most honest and genuine on earth.  

But they are, like all of us, shaped by their history and we have to accept that and work with that.

We have to show much more understanding and empathy than seen in the Cameron years, where he was more interested in getting back to playing tennis with Boris than sitting down and showing the people in Northern Ireland that he genuinely cared about their future.

Conference, a child born in 1998, the year the Good Friday Agreement was voted through by the people in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, would now be 18 years old.  

These children of the “peace generation” and the institutions that have brought about the peace are reaching adulthood.  Young people in Northern Ireland have lived a life unlike that of their parents’ generation.  They have experienced peace but have still not fully benefited from the peace dividend.

We must ensure that young people in Northern Ireland are equipped with the skills needed to get on in a modern economy.  In recent years we have seen that 30 per cent of job vacancies remain unfilled due to skills shortages and this is most prevalent in Northern Ireland’s largest companies.

It is a disgrace that 20 per cent of our young children are leaving school without being able to read and write properly.

And it is intolerable that in an education system where all that seems to matter is getting children through tests and exams, we have a situation where children’s access to specialist education is rationed by the sparsity of educational psychologists.

We must fight to ensure that we build up the skills base right across the region. Skills training must help those from all communities and backgrounds, and aim to help those the system has failed for far too long. Young men and women from the Shankill and the Falls, from the Bogside and the Fountain.  

We must help all in Northern Ireland and not just a lucky few.

In particular, we must find a way to deliver a better life for working class Protestants who are left completely adrift by political elites who have no idea how tough their lives are.

Conference, if Northern Ireland is to move forward, the Government in Westminster must be there to provide support when needed. The British Government, as a co-guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement with the Irish Government, has an important role in supporting Northern Ireland through the peace process.  

And now we must work together to get the best deal for Northern Ireland as we leave the European Union.  

Cameron’s Northern Ireland Secretaries, both of whom pushed hard for Brexit, were hard right ideologues and their dogmatic attitude have put the border at risk, severely damaged the economy of our closest and oldest neighbour and partner in peace, and given sustenance to those determined to break the UK apart

Getting this under control is the number one priority for us and it is no easy task that faces us and the people across the island of Ireland.

The whole of the peace process has been hugely underpinned by the European Union in a multitude of ways – most of which the Tories seem completely oblivious of.

The most obvious issue is whether or not we have to see the building of check points and passport controls on the border, but at least as difficult and much harder to quantify are the day-to-day issues that will effect Irish people across both sides of the border as they try to come to grips with a new reality.

The people of Northern Ireland need a Labour Government to ensure that their lives don’t once again become dominated by ideologues who put their views before anything else.

Peace on its own isn’t enough.  

We knew that in 1998 and it’s as true today.

We need real social justice to build communities where young people can maximise their potential, workers can feel secure in their workplaces and at home, and where everyone shares in the real prosperity of our shared nations.

And there are long standing issues that still remain to be resolved: a woman’s right to choose, a proper system of human rights, and a morass of problems that are the legacy of 30 years of conflict.

But this will only happen when we see the return of a Labour Government and we will only see that through a united Labour Party.

This is our historic mission and we can’t allow our present day problems to take us and the great people of Northern Ireland backwards.  

So let’s come together this week and put the needs of the people before everything else.

ENDS