Professor Jane Suiter:

It is interesting. All the Senators are talking almost about the same thing but in different ways, which is great. When I was talking about citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative events in Northern Ireland, the idea is that we would have a range of them. There can be very local, community-based events and women-only ones. There can be ones that are citywide or in different regions, or they could be about different issues and, therefore, they do not all have to be about the constitutional issue. One good way into it in Northern Ireland is to have them about some of the issues we heard about from the ESRI, for example, what do we do about educational disadvantage, what do we do about social issues, and get people thinking about that sort of thing. That is building up a deliberative culture in Northern Ireland. We are much more used to it in the South because we have had our citizens’ assemblies and so on.

Part of that feeds through to what Senator Martin was saying in that we are not necessarily saying there needs to be a constitutional citizens’ assembly in Northern Ireland that the British Government is going to convene. It is almost impossible because they cannot do it unless the unionist parties agree to go into it, and they would almost certainly operate a veto. Nonetheless, the idea of trying to build a deliberative culture of having different spaces and different venues is that one could end up with a Northern Ireland group which is actually looking at that group, but one would have to insist on the principle of inclusion, so one would need to have unionist voices, non-unionist voices, nationalist voices and so on. That is part of the way of bringing in those people who are frightened. People who are frightened tend to withdraw and they also tend to a more Hobbesian view of the world, and almost tend towards more authoritarian solutions. One of the ways to include people who are frightened is to bring them into non-threatening situations, such as local community deliberative events, talking about issues that really matter to them, rather than abstract constitutional issues first of all.