Member's statement: Southport Public Inquiry: Northern Ireland

Member's statement by Ms Connie Egan on 3 March 2025.

MLA: Ms Connie Egan
Party at the time: Alliance Party
Date: 3 March 2025
Type: Member's statement
Business: Members' Statements
Heading: Southport Public Inquiry: Northern Ireland
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 4825667

Text

I rise to speak of the absolute necessity of expanding the scope of the pending Southport public inquiry to include in its terms of reference Northern Ireland and other nations across the UK. What happened in Southport last summer was evil, senseless and incomprehensible. We all must learn lessons to ensure that such a tragedy never happens again. Three little girls, Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe, were horrifically murdered, and 10 more were injured by an individual who had previously been referred three times to the anti-extremism programme, Prevent. It is clear that there were failings, and a public inquiry is needed. As well as looking at that individual case, the inquiry will examine the wider issue of youth violence and extremism. That is a challenge that is, sadly, common across the UK. The online world is constantly growing and uncontrollable, filtering in extremism and facilitating actions of violence across all our communities. Entrenched attitudes of racial hatred and social media misinformation have reached the phones of our young people. There are no borders in online spaces, and very few ways to police and stop the spread of such toxic content. Youth violence and extremism have unique characteristics in Northern Ireland, where we see our local young people being groomed into violence and wider criminality by paramilitary gangs. It is also incredibly relevant to the Executive's strategic framework on ending violence against women and girls as the online world is driving the very violence that we are all dedicated to tackling. It would be an incredibly worthwhile exercise to extend the scope of the pending independent public inquiry to include Northern Ireland, as well as Scotland and Wales, so that we can collaboratively develop a holistic approach to those major challenges. Alliance's MP, Sorcha Eastwood, wrote to the Home Secretary last week to make that clear, and I reiterate that call today.

317 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers met the documented threshold for “not flagged”.

Overall probability that the activity is being used to promote, exploit or escalate an identity-based controversy: 0.09 (flagging needs at least 0.70; at or below 0.30 is not flagged).
None of the five culture-war criteria was met (each was below 0.60).
Assessed as legitimate policy scrutiny (0.89).
The text criticises or condemns the framing or division (0.58).
Subject area: Legacy of the Troubles, victims and paramilitarism.
The overall probability was at or below the not-flagging threshold.

This is an AI-generated assessment of the text, made against published criteria. It is not a finding of fact about the MLA or their intentions. The Assembly record itself is the fact.

Jev’s structured answers

Probability that each statement is true of this text (0 = no, 1 = yes). A criterion counts as met at 0.60 or above.
Question	Probability	Met?
Identity framing	0.06	No
Sectarian or communal antagonism	0.04	No
Cultural grievance politics	0.02	No
Dog-whistle messaging	0.05	No
Controversy escalation	0.06	No
Legitimate policy scrutiny	0.89	Yes
Overall judgement	0.09	At or below not-flagging threshold

Context and attribution (stance)
Option	Probability
No identity-based framing	0.41
Reports or questions it	0.00
Criticises or condemns it (chosen)	0.58
Adopts it	0.01

Subject area (top five)
Subject	Probability
Legacy of the Troubles, victims and paramilitarism	0.38
Sectarianism, hate crime and community relations	0.26
Immigration, asylum, race, ethnicity and Travellers	0.24
Gender, sexuality, abortion and related social issues	0.07
Sexism, misogyny, ageism and other equality groups	0.03

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:03 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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