Professor Fidelma Ashe:

From memory, it was over a couple of years. It was primarily legal experts who were on that commission. Some communities raised issues about bias in the commission but the experts are saying that, overall, it was viewed as a positive process.

There are different options. It does not have to be the Government. If it is, then there are always those issues of bias. It is possible to site this engagement in universities. There can be university programmes that will encompass and address these issues. One of the issues that would have to be dealt with if it were placed within the university sector would be, in my view, that there should be no prerequisite for being able to join those courses. They would be like continuous professional development courses and it would be open to all communities to be able to benefit from that. Again, that would have to be underpinned by a process of reaching out to communities. Rather than just the traditional way of advertising courses in a prospectus, you would have to go out to communities and explain to them what the system of civic education is designed to do, what its aims are, what their role in it would be, and what the benefits would be to them. There would be quite a bit of preparatory work before that.