Dr. Joanne McEvoy:

I thank the Chair for inviting Professor Todd and I to join the session today. We are delighted to be here to give evidence. We are reporting evidence from our research that has taken place over several years. Over the next ten minutes, we will explain that research and describe it as simply and as straightforwardly as we can. We will then invite questions. I will take five minutes and then pass over to Professor Todd.

I will first give the committee the context of the research. Our initial discussions took place in the wake of Brexit when, as we know, there was increased discussion on the potential of constitutional change on the island in the future. That discussion was dominated by official nationalism and a clear reticence to engage on the part of official unionism. We wanted to explore the multiplicity or diversity of voices across the islands on the issue. Our work was motivated, inspired and driven by the need to explore this multiplicity of voices from different communities, groups and citizens on their political engagement. These were citizens and communities who felt disengaged, marginalised, or disinterested from the constitutional discussion that was emerging in the wake of Brexit. On most counts this wide group of people amounted to close to half of the population on the island. It is clear that only with their participation in the discussion on the constitutional future of the island would such a process by fully inclusive and democratic, and only with their participation and inclusion would it be legitimate.

Research questions were driven by this need to engage with these citizens and communities and especially around several important questions: do such citizens and groups want to participate in a constitutional discussion; what is important to them and what are their priorities should they wish to participate; and if they do not wish to participate or if they face obstacles in their participation, what are these obstacles and what might be done about them? We engaged in open-ended conversations with some 120 politically and constitutionally disengaged participants across the island in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. We engaged with them in a series of in-depth interviews, in focus groups, and in a series of informal deliberative cafés, which is a participatory research method. We talked with migrant groups, disadvantaged young people, university young people, women's groups including Border women's groups, gender activists, and citizens and communities all accessed through community organisations. They came from North, South and from the Border area. They came from different backgrounds. There were people who identify as unionist or as nationalist, and those who identify as neither. Their main interests were in social issues rather than directly political issues.

Most of our work was with mixed groups, mixed focus groups and mixed deliberative cafes. We wanted to access their views on this debate and on North-South relations. We designed the research in a way that would focus on the participants' own voices and their own perspectives to drive and to shape the discussion in the way that they wanted it to, to focus on their values and their priorities, and to facilitate research in a way that enabled them to voice their own concerns. We also designed a set of focus groups conducted by Ipsos MORI with a representative sample of the constitutionally undecided. These were groups of people who have been surveyed to say that should there be a referendum on the future of the constitutional status of the island, they would be undecided and would not know how to vote. This was another 30 participants, half from the North and half from the South.

Following these different projects, we tested our findings in a policy seminar and in academic workshops. We worked with fellow academics, with politicians and community partners. We had a policy seminar in June 2022 with a number of policymakers from Dublin and Belfast. Our work was really about developing and experimenting with informal and small-scale deliberative sessions. These sessions were designed to be educative and explore different policy questions with the communities that we had engaged with and how people relate these policy problems that they had identified as important to the wider political and constitutional questions. Our work was multi-method and evidence based.

Although the work was not representative, we suggest that the findings are meaningful and credible in showing patterns of response of large sections of the population. It helped us to map ways towards having a more inclusive discussion on the island's constitutional future. The findings are mapped out and described in more detail in the report and a series of academic publications. I will start to explain the findings and then I will invite Professor Todd to take over.

We found considerable and important convergence among these diverse groups on their values and their priorities for what they wanted to see happen in the discussions.

We found the more people talked, the more there was convergence. Importantly, we found that when there was greater participation, this did not bring about increased polarisation, as some fear with this discussion. Rather, it allowed participants to think about and share their views and avoid having knee-jerk reactions. Frequently, participants re-engaged with statements they had made early on and qualified them, learned from one another's viewpoints and shared those experiences. I will now hand over to Professor Todd.