Ms Noeleen Diver:

I will address the plank of the proposal regarding participative democracy at all levels. It has been said that the largest political party in Northern Ireland is the non-voter. There is a risk that the health and vitality of a democracy will decline as engagement declines. Nowadays, there appears to be little likelihood of a positive inertia, that we can sit still safely with the status quo. We will move in one direction or another, but we will move. We will live with each other; our society will evolve for better or worse, locally, nationally or globally. We are learning, however, that democracy is not just about elections and voting, it is about engagement and partnership - the dealing with. Covid-19 has displayed the need for community engagement in the most practical of ways and, better still, it has shown the appetite there is for this engagement and the creativity it has engendered. Apathy might be more of a myth than we expect.

Building engagement requires good infrastructure - trusting, respectful spaces for listening, learning and creative deliberation that in turn leads to concrete outcome. Openness to the unexpected in terms of the options for those outcomes and from where those ideas might come is all part of the journey. Most good things take time and patience. The need for concrete outcomes that people see are addressing their concerns and aspirations, indeed, which help them to articulate and work through what these core concerns and aspirations mean, is essential. We have tools to help with this. Indeed, we have used some to a greater or lesser extent. I will refer to just two.

Ireland is a leader in the use of citizens' assemblies. We see the benefit derived from these processes for what were highly sensitive, even intractable, issues. In Northern Ireland, in the community voluntary sector, we have one assembly on how to make social care for the elderly fit for purpose. The reports from this were very supportive of the process.

Participatory budgeting, PB, is another tool. This is not new to Ireland. South Dublin County Council is one of several councils that run PB processes, I believe to the value of €300,000. In Northern Ireland, PB is also gaining momentum, but it is at the grant-making end of the spectrum. We are endeavouring to move our processes towards the mainstreaming of PB, where the priorities of government programmes are shaped and voted upon by the citizens they impact.

We also have some structures that may evolve to support these activities. In the Republic, there are the public participation networks, PPNs, of local government, and in the North, for example, we have our community planning partnerships. I cannot speak to the PPNs but our community planning partnerships have quite some way to go to really engage citizens in a meaningful and decisive role. Perhaps the limited role of our local government in the North may also be an impairment to this. At the Executive and Assembly levels, there is a void at level of a civic forum.

All of this is an attempt to speak to a need for formal express channels for citizens to participate, where agency, and thus confidence, is built in ourselves and in each other, where what is sensitive and intricate may be discussed and deliberated upon respectfully and constructively. I think we actually have glimpsed some of this. This empowerment has been shown to support the understanding and trust between citizens and between citizens and their representatives. We had the 2008 crash and its outworkings. We now have Covid-19 and what may be the unforeseen consequences, and we have, of course, the challenges of climate breakdown. None of these have respected any borders. They have perhaps emphasised the need for our doing with each other in new and even surprising ways. If such doing with at all levels engenders engagement, creativity and partnership, we might even find the journey to be ultimately affirming the best in each of us.

I will end by quoting Inez McCormack:

To enable the powerless to be part of making change. That changes how they see themselves. And that changes everything.