Citizens' assembly

You saw it on other issues sporadically along the way as well.

I thought it was notable in July when it came to that vote on what Sinn Féin is calling for around Irish unity, that you should have a green paper ready within 18 months, that you should set up a Citizens' Assembly.

Other opposition parties, by and large, backed that.

Again, just right at the close of the Dáil term, you saw parties kind of coalescing around an idea that, albeit perhaps from the other opposition parties with less enthusiasm.

We certainly have never done a binding referendum.

We've also had a citizens assembly on community safety and well-being where we asked citizens directly.

on how the city can make their lives safer, make their quality of life better.

So this is about how we engage people in a meaningful way.

But going back to your question, I think it's how we engage with the community throughout the term.

And we've done a lot of things differently this time around.

So one of them, again, was the Citizens Assembly.

And community safety has always been a top-of-mind question for the city.

And we saw a piece of legislation being put forward recently around that and making plans and preparations for a United Ireland and for a border poll.

I think citizens' assemblies have been a really good form of... public participation in Ireland, like other countries, look to the Citizens Assembly model in Ireland and think, geez, look, that's brilliant.

So I think, I don't know why we're not using them as much as we used to.

And I think that this is one of those fundamental things.

It's not like, I'm not saying, oh, have a Citizens Assembly and it'll all be hashed out in the room and, you know, it'll be sorted.

But there are lots of communities across the island who haven't met each other, north and south.

You know, there's, I think, an image of the big bad north down here for some people.

Yeah, and I'm not saying we should necessarily adopt those systems wholesale, but one of the great revolutions in Europe over the last 10 or 15 years has been the rise of citizens assemblies or citizens juries where you randomly select citizens to discuss important political issues, whether it's abortion rights in Ireland or climate change or how to deal with an aging population and things like this.

And they're going back to these, the Citizens Assembly model, which, well, you choose people balancing for representation in terms of gender and social background and ethnicity.

So they're kind of, an algorithm helps.

These are ways, I think, of putting people back in touch with democracy and giving them agency.

Yeah, it's a great tie-in, actually, with local government and communities.

So the idea of a citizens' assembly is you bring together an accurate representation of that community.

In Auckland we had one, Watercare ran one about five years ago on the future of our water sources here in Auckland.

And you bring together, might be around 100 people in the room, and they need to accurately represent the demographics of that community.

Like I mentioned, Auckland did one with water care.

There's also been a couple in Auckland and other parts of the country around what do you do with a golf course in the community, for example? How do people want to see that land developed and they have the opportunity to input into that? But they can also be done at a national scale.

So Ireland have a really good citizens' assembly mechanism.

They've done quite a few now.

completely.

And I do think like, when did we, we had the Citizens Assembly on drugs there, you know, the big national conversation.

And that, it was, it was really, I thought, God, that, It was really interesting to see on the TV, you know, the news reports that the Citizens' Assembly on Drugs is meeting and convening for the nine months and looking at various elements that needed to be addressed in drug policy and in drug treatment and in provision, measures to reduce stigma, measures to make treatment accessible.

And I do think that that was like this national conversation And I think that was helpful because it broke down some barriers.

They seized on that and they said, "Well, it's not in his gift to take it off the table." Uh, they, you know, their sort of attitude was, well, it's, you know, it's, it's written into the Good Friday Agreement that at some stage in the future when they think there could be a majority vote.

But the one thing I will say that has been suggested by not just Sinn Féin and others, that as part of the preparation for s- for, we'll say, a poll sometime down the road, that a constitut- a, a citizens assembly should be set up to actually start the, you know, the groundwork.

Because Andy Burnham was very clear that, you know, you can't just cartwheel into this in the absolutely and utterly reckless and arrogant manner that, uh, that David Cameron held the, uh, the Brexit referendum, that, you know, this re- requires massive groundwork.

You can't just put a hard deadline and say, "By 2030 we're gonna have a poll." That doesn't make any sense.

But they, laying the groundwork and having ki- um, s- s- something like a citizens assembly on both sides of the border, because I covered a few of those citizens assemblies, the earlier ones, and I was genuinely struck at how effective they were at bringing people together, finding commonalities, thrashing out the issues, really drilling down into the people's concerns about things.

You know, I'm say, talking about the referendums particularly held, or the assemblies to, before the repeal, the eighth, uh, referendum, and the, uh, marriage equality referendum.

And the amount of work that was done to actually bring people from the two sides to, you know, into the center.

They want to, it's part of the, the, the bill that they're, they're proposing.