Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Taoiseach for engaging with us as Cathaoirligh of the committees today. I am delighted to be here in my role as Cathaoirleach of the relatively new Oireachtas Joint Committee on Gender Equality, which, of course, is a time-limited committee. I thank the Taoiseach also for his engagement with our committee to date and his continued engagement.

We were established in December with a nine-month timeframe from the date of the first public meeting. We held our first public meeting on 3 March and the deadline for our report is, therefore, early December. We have a wonderful secretariat and a very engaged membership and, of course, our work is focused on the 45 recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality, which we regard as establishing a blueprint for the achievement of a more equal Ireland, a genuinely gender-equal Ireland.

We have approached our work in a modular fashion dividing up those 45 recommendations into a number of modules with a view to preparing what we see as an action plan for Government in December, that is, a plan to bridge the recommendations themselves and Government implementation of them.

We model ourselves on former Senator Catherine Noone's Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution which, of course, was established following the Citizens' Assembly on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution and which provided a practical report as to how to implement the recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly. It is in that spirit that we view our work. We are not reopening the substantive policy issues that the Citizens' Assembly reviewed. Rather, we are looking at how their recommendations may be implemented.

We have finished two modules and have almost concluded a third module. The first module we considered was the recommendations of the assembly on constitutional change - recommendations 1 to 3, inclusive. We have also concluded hearings on domestic, sexual and gender-based violence recommendations and we are reviewing currently recommendations on norms and stereotypes in education.

If I could focus on the constitutional recommendations, and I asked yesterday in the Dáil about these in the context of the Taoiseach's questions on citizens' assemblies, the Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality made three recommendations relating to the Constitution. The first proposed a referendum to strengthen the equality guarantee in Article 40.1. The second sought to expand the definition of the family in Article 41 to cover non-marital families. The third sought to amend Article 41, specifically, to take out the sexist language currently within it and to offer gender-neutral protection for carers.

My direct question is whether the Government will commit to holding a referendum or referendums in 2023 to give effect to these recommendations. I should say that, as a committee, we are engaging closely with the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, on this and have sought that he and the Government might make that commitment. Indeed, we will be providing the Minister shortly with a position paper setting out a series of options for wording because we want to move the debate on.

We are conscious there is a general political will to have these referendums. The Taoiseach has indicated that too. There is a positivity in Government to this but it is really how we get to the point where we have got a wording that we can build a consensus around and that we go to the people on.

Finally, more broadly, at present we are seeing quite a number of new citizens' assemblies, either established or proposed. It is positive because these are useful and valuable mechanisms for achieving a deliberative form of democratic decision-making. I am an advocate for them, but what we heard from Dr. Catherine Day and, in particular, from the individual members on this Citizens' Assembly, was the need to ensure that citizens see their recommendations taken seriously by legislators and Government and, indeed, brought into effect and implemented, and that, without that sort of direct linkage between the report of each assembly and changes in policy, we may see less faith in the power of the Citizens' Assembly and, indeed, less good will among citizens towards engagement with them. I thank the Taoiseach for his responses on those.