Thank you, Mr Speaker. First, I thank members of the Muslim community for their presence here today, for their resilience and for their dignity. Some of what you have had to hear this afternoon will not have been easy. I acknowledge the fear that they and those from minority ethnic communities are living through. That should be our focus, and you have been let down. Collectively, we need to do better. What has unfolded over the past few days has been shocking, unsettling and very sad. It is hard to make sense of it. How did we get here? Was it 14 years of a Tory Government and their hostile environment? Was it the newspaper headlines demonising the most vulnerable and platforming hostility as though it were a legitimate viewpoint? We know that there are dark forces at play on social media. How much of this was them? What impact has our failure to progress key pieces of legislation, our stop-start government and our financial instability had? Is political hesitancy and, at times, silence in the face of hate crime to blame? Anna Lo always said that sectarianism and racism are two sides of the same coin. Has our inability to meaningfully tackle sectarianism, having normalised suspicion and dislike of the other, been a driving force? My view is that all of this is true. Wound together and set against a context of misinformation, disinformation and inequality, here we find ourselves, a complex path that has led us to a dark and frightening place.

Thankfully, there are ways out of here, but we will need to grow together. As a first step, we must agree that the violence on our streets is unacceptable. We wholeheartedly condemn it, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Members have been in agreement on this. Secondly, we need to name the problem. Those businesses that were attacked were owned by Muslims. The end point of the riots was the Belfast Islamic Centre. There is no ambiguity here. The unrest was powered by racism and Islamophobia, and the motion states that.

We need to focus on how we listen to the voices of those who have been impacted on. Not one of us who has spoken today has their lived experience. Those who are in fear need to be safe and protected, and we must be visible to them and guided by their needs. The path from here gets harder. Tackling inequality is not easy. We have an insufficient Budget and crises everywhere you look. Housing, poverty, health and education all need to be fixed. We need a properly resourced Justice budget. Legislation is not far from completion on racial equality, refugee integration and anti-poverty, but the good news is that the Assembly is up and running, we have Ministers in place and we can get on with it, and we must.

I feel very uncomfortable with the insistence of some beginning their remarks by stating that there are legitimate concerns. I will read what the Victims' Commissioner said, which was:

"So-called 'legitimate concerns' are never acknowledged when we have condemned examples of sectarian hate crime, sexual assault or street violence in the past. It should therefore play no part in our messaging when we condemn violence against victims who are non-white."