Sinn Fein object to 'homophobic' question about definition of woman

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00:00Moving on to the next one, violence against women and girls, the last time officials were

00:05here from the executive office I asked to define what a woman was. Has anything changed

00:13within the executive office since that to discover if they've agreed on a definition

00:18of what a woman is? Because it's very, very important when it comes to one of your flagship

00:22strategies is ending violence against women and girls.

00:25I think, if I may cover that, I think my colleague said there wouldn't be a definition

00:30because they weren't going to define something that has an understandable meaning. Nothing's

00:36changed around that. On the funding may have come back a chair. I think the budget process

00:41is really, really important that it sits alongside the programme for government. We wouldn't

00:46have expected to go out in a draft consultation with a fully costed set of actions. This is

00:54high-level priorities which will lead to a finalised programme for government with

01:02actions agreed, but that has got to move forward in tandem with the budget process. But I don't

01:07think we could cost at this high level. The costings will have to be done in line with

01:13the actions that flow from the process that Michael's outlined, that he's engaged in at

01:18the moment, looking for the right actions and targets to propose to ministers, and then

01:23financial decisions will be made by the executive in the normal way.

01:26I appreciate the contrast of politics, but some of the things Timothy is saying about

01:31definition of women I find homophobic. And if it was sectarian or if it was racist, it

01:39would be challenged. So I just want to put that in the record. He's entitled to his view,

01:43but we're entitled to have a different view. And I honestly don't want that to be seen

01:51as a position of the committee, because if that's going to continue, we need to go around

01:57and ask everybody, do they agree with him or not? I mean, that's how strongly I feel about this.