Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

All the ground cannot be covered in five minutes, but I will of course be very happy to answer questions.

I want to say a few words about my connections with the North as a woman born in Dublin. It is very important for us in the South to always look at what our connections are and not to think in the separate, siloed view we have had to due to the will of history, I suppose. My mother was a Belfast woman. Though she grew up in Dublin, we had a lot of family connections. My daughter, for complicated family reasons, went to school for most of her life in Belfast.

I have also had a lot of connections over the years with the women’s movement, through lesbian, gay and LGBTIQ politics and through my academic work where the women’s and gender studies programmes I was involved in had a lot of North-South connections, which I was always very pleased about, as well as very specifically through the women’s education programmes and especially community-based women’s education programmes I have been involved with and involved in setting up over the years. The insights and experience I build on come from all that, but probably particularly from the North-South education programmes. I will mention two in particular. The very first one was called the POWER programme, which was short for Politically-Organised Women Educating for Representation, though I think many of the women felt we were educating for revolution. We were in a way because it was revolutionary to bring together women from North and South, and especially from community-based settings, to work together to think about the connections, the common ground and talk about some of the things – or all of the things – women never get a chance to talk about, including the reality of the Border and the difference it made and still makes in women’s lives. That programme, which was funded by peace and reconciliation funds, ran just after the Good Friday Agreement in the very early 2000s. Unfortunately, the funding only allowed us to do two sessions - two years.

I state very clearly there is often funding for programmes that bring people together – I am talking about from the point of view of women – and they are invaluable programmes, but they rarely get any kind of sustainable funding. I often think we are just throwing pieces of paper and whatnot into the wind and allowing them to blow away. You can spend a year with people, but a year is nothing. You need two, three, four or five. You need programmes you can plan, develop and build and we have been really bad at doing that and recognising that.

We did not recognise the importance for so many women of access to education. When the shared island unit was founded a meeting was called, as Ms DeSouza will know, to talk about women North and South, and women North and South attended. It was during Covid and held on Zoom. The meeting lasted for an hour and a quarter and at the end I said it was ridiculous and that the organisers could not just bring us together for an hour and a quarter and think it was done and we had talked about women. There had been a whole day for young people. I thought we would need months for women. Arising from that, I suggested we needed an all-Ireland assembly or forum of women. That was really the beginning of the All-Island Women’s Forum. My friend and colleague Ms DeSouza will talk about that so I will not say more about it, but as part of that I felt it was also very important to bring women together from groups and organisations, both community-based and NGOs, from North and South, to talk about and explore the common ground. That was what we did in a programme for a year which was called Encounters. Groups came together and met for a couple of hours on Zoom. Quite a lot emerged from those programmes and it was extraordinary that on the basis of just an hour or two of conversation women recognised there were things they could work on together and ways in which they could work. For example, on the issue of women and violence against women we had the Women’s Aid Federation Northern Ireland and Women’s Aid here in the South renewing a connection that had dissipated over the years. They now have a common project. It is the same with the Rainbow Project in the North and LGBT Ireland, which now have a project that focuses on older LGBTIQ people. We get put into our groups of gender, sexuality, rural women, age and so on and so forth, but you are never just one thing. You are always a complicated person with many dimensions to your life. Those conversation-based, discussion-based, connection-based programmes have been very important foundational moves in enabling us to move towards talking about the really difficult political issues that come from different traditions, but also the sheer difficulty of reconfiguring an entire island, an entire society in terms of its constitution and then working out what would happen.

I was asked to talk a little about the barriers to women’s participation in politics and I will just say briefly that there are huge barriers and we know that. The numbers are still very low. I am not going to go through them all, but the absence of confidence and the absence of access to relevant information is crucial. People do not feel confident if they do not have the information. They feel they cannot compete. They do not see people like themselves in there. They do not know how to get there or how the system works. We have to give people information. We have to work with them to develop their understanding and to do something practical with that information. The sorts of programmes I have had the privilege to be involved in, along with others, including Eileen Weir up in the North, whom the committee has spoken to, are very much about that. It is about saying to women that we are not telling them what to think, what to do politically or where to go or what to do with their life, but giving them the kind of information, knowledge, information, access and equipment to give them the sort of tools they need to do these things. That is extremely important.

I was also asked to address something else. Clearly I cannot do it in the one moment that remains to me; I can see the Chair has been very patient so far. It is about how to encourage women to engage in the whole process of change and how we engage women to campaign. That is a huge question, but the thing we always have to do when working in this kind of field is to have a very clear purpose and bring people together collectively. We have to move outside the silos and seek to break down the barriers. For so many women there are barriers that do not even feel like barriers because you are just isolated and on your own. You are there with your family or maybe in your community, but you know you are not reaching out beyond that. I would be very happy to answer questions on campaigning, which might be more useful.

The third area I was asked to think about was why does this matter.

In a way, that is not a question I should even have to answer in this day and age. Of course it matters that women, that all marginalised groups and that all voices should be heard. They have to be and are entitled to be heard in a process that is fundamentally about reconfiguring the way our society functions and our island works. That is a democratic right, but it is also practically really important. The difference it makes is that once we begin to bring in the unheard voices, we will stop having a top-down limited restricted view of what should happen and rather something which is certainly much more complex but which is much richer, more diverse and is not just closer to the reality of everyday life but is everyday life. That is where people live and that is where people do their politics out of.

Bringing politics and the Constitution into the realm off the absolute everyday makes it very real. I am saying this to TDs who are dealing with people every day in real-life situations. Constitutional change so often seems like a very distant faraway abstract thing. We are saying here in this committee that that is not good enough. It is not an abstraction. It is up to all of us to seek to make this process as real and as meaningful as we possibly can and to invite in all of the diverse voices we need to hear to reach an understanding of what it is possible for us to create in a very different kind of Ireland. I could say much more. I hope people will feel able to ask me questions.