Campaign for Youth Assembly

Thursday 25 October 07

Christoper Madden (15) is a young man from Carrickfergus, County Antrim. Through WIMPS he has been campaiging to have a 'Shadow Youth Council' established in his Borough, and has now also begun a campaign to establish a Youth Assembly. In his own words, this is how he is getting on...

My quest for a Northern Ireland Youth Assembly started in July 2007 when I was trying to start up a Shadow Youth Council in Carrickfergus.  I thought that there should be one big organisation in Northern Ireland that has a direct link to Stormont and which addresses issues that affect young people.  Every other region in the UK has a Shadow Youth Assembly/Parliament [see the Scottish Youth Parliament and Welsh 'Funky Dragon' sites] and I thought, well why shouldn’t we?

By this stage I had joined WIMPS and I decided to use this site to contact local politicians.  I sent an email regarding the possible establishment of a Shadow Youth Assembly to all 108 MLA’s. 

I started getting loads of replies and some from high up people in the different parties, Willliam McCrea, Jeffrey Donaldson and Gerry Adams were just some of the people that replied.  In total I got twenty four replies back all pledging their support to the establishment of a Northern Ireland Youth Assembly.

Unfortunately most of the MLA’s pledged their support and it was left at that. 

So - what next? How do you feel about this issue? How can we help Chris to get this moved forward? Would you like to see a Youth Assembly established?Let us know in the discussion forum.