Professor Jennifer Todd:

Most of our participants, even though they said they were disengaged from politics, were in fact interested in the constitutional issue. They wanted to be involved in the discussions and they saw it as important. There were of course practical issues that stopped them going to meetings, but the central obstacle, or the most surprising obstacle we found, was that most of all and most convergent, was that they did not like the way the constitutional issue was being discussed. They said they found it ideological and that they had spent lots of time moving away from what they thought were old ideologies and they did not want to go back to them. They said they did not care much about things like the technical details of a referendum or the exact institutional form of an united Ireland. What they wanted to talk about were the social problems that exist now, and the shape of a possible united Ireland, that is, what a good society would look like and whether a united Ireland would be a better society. That was common between people from unionist and nationalist backgrounds, and from neither. What they wanted was constitutional discussion to begin with what some of them called organic or bread and butter issues, and gender rights and socioeconomic issues. That sounds like a shared island perspective but the more we explored, the more they wanted to go beyond this. They wanted to go beyond it in two ways. Obviously, they wanted grassroots, bottom-up participation and to help define what the problems were rather than have people making speeches about them. They also wanted to move beyond the problems to ways of resolving them and to ways forward. Therefore, they wanted to open up the constitutional issue via things such as gender guides to how to create a better society. They wanted unbiased information on this. They were deliberative participants. They often mentioned the citizens' assemblies and so on and they wanted unbiased information to be made publicly available on both sides of the Border, showing how the problems they experienced in everyday life would be impacted by different constitutional arrangements. They also wanted policy-makers to take their concerns seriously. Border women in particular said they were constantly being consulted and that their consultations were then put into a briefcase or a filling cabinet somewhere and did no good.

We found a particular lack of knowledge in the South towards Northern Ireland, and a particular need for discussion in the South, in the Republic of Ireland. It turned out in the Ipsos focus groups that the southern focus groups expressed much more hardline attitudes than the Northerners did. They said things like "No" to any change in flag or anthem. One young man said his ancestors had fought for Irish freedom and he was not going to change what they won. What was interesting about the South was that the more people talked, the more they changed their minds. Sometimes they changed their minds in practically the next sentence. By an hour and a half later, at the end of the focus group, all of them said things would not work without compromise and negotiation. What this shows is that deliberation and discussion is especially important in the Republic of Ireland to allow Southerners as well as Northerners to reflect on what is necessary in a potential united Ireland. If we look at the one comparative situation of reunification in recent history, which is German reunification, what happened there, partially because it was done in such a hurry, was that East Germany how to change a whole lot while West Germany did not change at all. Even decades later, that still provokes resentment in East Germany. What we have to avoid in an Irish situation is the South staying the same and the North changing a lot because that will not work. We have to prepare for both South and North being able to change to something like a new Ireland.

I will mention a couple of policy issues to finish up. We are academics not policymakers but several clear recommendations have emerged from our research. Deliberations have to go beyond the big set piece citizens' assemblies, which work well, to small informal local participatory events and there has to be a lot of them. As Dr. McEvoy said, these events have two functions. One is educative and the other is defining the problems which policy has to resolve on a local and spatial level and helping define the form of a united Ireland, or possibly united Ireland of the Good Friday Agreement, that can then go to the public at larger-scale events. One example is healthcare. Our Border women discussed fairly problematic issues of the provision of healthcare across the Border and they were very expert in doing this. What followed from what they were saying was that any possible model of an united Ireland would have to be able to deal with those dysfunctions of healthcare in the Border area because of course they would be even more scandalous in one State. What these small-scale discussions do is to find problems and constitutional experts and policymakers can then look at possible ways of resolving these and put them back again to the public. How is this to be done? Two models come to mind. The first is the model which worked quite well in the decade of commemorations. This involves sets of small-scale events happening in locations from schools to local councils and so on, where local deliberations could be had on the issues that need to be looked at. The challenge is do such deliberation on a cross-Border basis. We feel it is very important to do that. Another example comes up in other countries where there are days of deliberation across the entire island in different forums, from schools to online forums to anything from councils to mother and child groups. Again, the challenge will be to collate the results, input them into new constitutional models to be put back again to the public.

We concluded that co-ordinated collaborative research is necessary to maximise participation, inclusion, accountability, and legitimacy in constitutional debate. We proposed the establishment of a dedicated research centre to collect and collate research results from big surveys down to local informal deliberative events and to map a cumulative programme of research over, say, the next five years. We considered it important this would be done now before a referendum becomes imminent. An alternative mechanism would be to incorporate a diverse and inclusive academic team into a renewed shared island unit. We thank the committee members for inviting us and we look forward to their questions.