Ms Sophie Nelson:

I thank Deputy Tully for her questions. Generally, there was great engagement during the residential discussions in Dundalk. The pedagogical approach was around discussing the key socioeconomic issue of healthcare and having an environment where people who have a similar shared identity could discuss it in a way that, as I said, was not politicised to the same extent as if you asked someone how they would vote in a referendum on Irish unity and then get into the conversation about healthcare. What emerged from those discussions is that there is a chronic disconnection between urban and rural communities, and there is chronic economic division between working-class and middle-class communities. In addition, increased privatisation has increased inequality across healthcare. One woman spoke of her social life, saying that friendship groups are turning into health services. However, those groups are not the place for that. That illuminated just how much attention we need to pay to providing LGBTQI+ women with services.

Friendship groups are spaces that are meant for fun, socialising and yes, talking about difficult issues. If, however, those friendship groups were to become peer support groups all the time, they essentially would be acting as a form of healthcare. We are locking women out of public opportunity within those spaces as well. It is important to mention that women told us there was an issue of access within the healthcare system and that there was a need for policy reform to reflect their intersectional identities. Women also came up with really innovative solutions as to what an all-island healthcare system could look like, which included community-funded primary care, rural architecture, eco-villages, community clusters and engaging with women's sector organisations to shape healthcare policies that reflect the diversification of our society. It is exactly these kinds of discussions that will help shape the vision of what we want a constitution to look like. Without this vision, we will not able to progress very far. That is the value of these discussions. While we are outlining the problems here, that is, chronic issues with disconnection and privatisation, we also are coming together in a space that is safe and protected where we can discuss innovative solutions to those problems. That is what emerged from those discussions. There was more hope in the room. However, as I said before, there also was a real and predominant sense of distrust around political institutions. There was a question of how will we do this. We need to have a vision but we also need for political representatives to provide a more substantive change and what that would look like. We need to be able to give our own views on that as well. Consequently, we need both to be able to have a vision ourselves and the buy-in from political parties and institutions to tell us what that would look like in practice. That is also really important. In terms of having more discussions around these issues, as far as I know, the project is running out of funding. We hope it will be the case that we will be able to do so in the future but I cannot say for sure, as the project has not, as of yet, been prefunded.