ILEX bears witness at Stormont

The hearing took place on March 18 and was convened to hear evidence from ILEX on its Regeneration Plan for Derry/Londonderry

Chair of the meeting was Mr Simon Hamilton and his deputy was Mr David Hilditch. Also sitting were SDLP Foyle MLA Mrs Mary Bradley, Mr Mickey Brady, Mr Thomas Burns, Ms Anna Lo and Mr Fra McCann.

The full transcript follows below.

"The Chairperson (Mr Hamilton): Joining us today are Sir Roy McNulty, chairman of Ilex, and Dr Aideen McGinley, chief executive of Ilex. You are both very welcome; it is good to see you here. Members have a cover note from the Clerk, a briefing paper and presentation from Ilex, correspondence from the

Minister for Social Development dated 31 March and 6 December 2009, ministerial correspondence dated 2 December 2008, and Sir Roy's report of 25 June 2008.

I remind members that the briefing is for information purposes only. The Committee should not come to any conclusions on Ilex before consulting the Committee for the Office of the First Minister and

deputy First Minister, which also has responsibility for Ilex. Today's meeting will be recorded by Hansard.

Sir Roy McNulty (Ilex): I thank the Committee for granting us the opportunity to share with you some of what we have being doing and thinking about. I thank you, Chairperson, in particular, for the interest that you have shown in what we are doing in Derry and for visiting us. I also thank Mary Bradley, who has soldiered along with us on the strategy board, where we have all spent many happy hours

looking at the development plan. I will talk briefly about the regeneration plan and what we are doing in that regard.

I did a review two and a bit years ago, and I concluded that there was a serious need for us to get our collective act together in Derry.

We have aimed to arrive at one vision and one plan to which most, if not all, of us are signed up. As part of our preparatory work, we did an inventory of Derry's existing strategies and plans. We stopped at 74, which gives you some idea of the complexities that we have been working through in the past.

We are keen to get buy-in from across the community for our one vision and one plan, which is why we have involved almost 1,000 people in the exercise in one way or another.

We wanted to have a clear organisational framework so that we all understood how we are going to channel people's efforts in one direction rather than multiple directions, as the complex organisational set-up did in the past.

We are keen for the plan to be ambitious, because tinkering at the edges will not sort out Derry's substantial problems. We share Margaret Ritchie's aspiration and ambition that we should aim to deliver the best regeneration ever seen in any city in these islands.

The project must be innovative, because keeping on doing things in the way that we have always done them will only produce the same results that we have always had.

Therefore, we need to find new and different ways of going about things.

It is also important that we be realistic. We are in the middle, or maybe at the end, of the biggest recession that any of us have

ever seen.

We are all well aware that public expenditure constraints will be severe after the election.

Indeed, one could not have chosen a more challenging situation in which to try to move forward.

The equality dimension is an important theme of what we have done over the last year or so.

We have set ourselves the aim of producing a plan that will bring about measurable improvements for the groups who have been identified as experiencing inequality.

We are trying to have that aim mainstreamed within the whole process. That is not terribly easy, but it is the key to success in Derry.

We have seen lots of plans in the past that have not made a big

difference in the most deprived areas, and we want to redress that.

We hope to have the full first draft tomorrow. We have had some drafts that, frankly, we did not like very much and that were not good enough. We have been promised that we will have a full first draft by tomorrow, and the strategy board will see that next week. We hope to have a

good final draft by the end of May or early in June, as people's minds will soon be focused on elections and important subjects such as that. We will then consult on that final draft and take it from there.

We have learned that things sometimes take a bit longer than we might hope, but that is life.

A tremendous amount of hard work has been done, and a lot of people have put a lot of time into the project.

We are making progress, and the commitment of a huge number of people is

tremendous. Dialogue has improved steadily over the last couple of years, and the relationships among all concerned are a lot better.

We are clear that we have the opportunity to produce a really good plan, and we now need to work on putting in place the capacity to deliver it.

The benefits to Derry and the region could be considerable, and we are absolutely determined to succeed in the endeavour.

That is all that I want to say about the regeneration plan. I will hand over to Dr McGinley to talk about the three main projects that we are pursuing, and, inevitably, about the city of culture bid.

I should say that I have brought a copy of our recent annual report, which has just been published. I will leave that with the Committee Clerk.

Dr Aideen McGinley (Ilex): I am delighted to have the opportunity to brief the Committee.

The Chairperson has already visited us, and we would be happy for other Committee members to visit, because it is extremely valuable to see what is happening on the ground.

The regeneration plan creates a framework for the transformation of the city, and, within that, Ilex has two roles.

It was formed in 2003 as an urban regeneration company with the primary aim of transformation and regeneration, through working closely with the Department for Social Development (DSD) and the Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister (OFMDFM), our sponsor Departments, as well as Derry City Council and other partners.

The second part of our work involves the two military sites, Fort George and Ebrington.