Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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Apologies have been received from Chris Hazzard MP and Senator Francis Black.

I wish to welcome in particular our newly elected members from the North who have joined us online, namely, Sorcha Eastwood MP, Dáire Hughes MP and Cathal Mallaghan MP. They are very welcome indeed.

I also pay tribute to Mickey Brady, Stephen Farry, Michelle Gildernew and Francie Molloy, former MPs who participated in our committees and brought their own experiences, knowledge and ability to communicate. Their capacity to meet people and share their experiences was very helpful and important to all of us. We will write to them to thank them for their service on behalf of the committee. They were very helpful to us.

I welcome our witnesses, Ms Ailbhe Smyth and Ms Emma DeSouza, to discuss women and constitutional change. I thank them both for their attendance.

I will explain some limitations to parliamentary privilege and the practice of the Houses as regards references witnesses may make to another person or persons in their evidence. The evidence of witnesses physically present or who give evidence from within the parliamentary precincts is protected, pursuant to both the Constitution and statute, by absolute privilege.

However, witnesses and participants who are to give evidence from a location outside the parliamentary precincts are asked to note they may not benefit from the same level of immunity from legal proceedings as a witness giving evidence from within the parliamentary precincts does and may consider it appropriate to take legal advice on this matter. Witnesses are also asked to note that only evidence connected with the subject matter should be given and should respect directions given by the Chair. They should also respect the parliamentary practice to the effect that, where possible, they should neither criticise nor make charges against any person, persons or entity either by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity.

Members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against a person outside the Houses or an official, either by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable. We have to read that before every meeting.

I call Ms Smyth to make her opening statement. She is very welcome indeed. Then we will hear from Ms DeSouza.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

I wish everyone good morning and thank them for giving me the opportunity to speak to them. Please forgive my voice and if I cough it is because I have been ill for the last couple of weeks. I gather it is five minutes for a statement.

Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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Whatever. There is no problem.

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.

Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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I thank Ms Smyth.

Ms Emma DeSouza:

It is a pleasure to be here this morning. I thank the Chair and committee members for the invitation to contribute to this conversation.

The Good Friday Agreement includes a commitment to North-South equivalence on rights as well as the full participation of women in public and political life. An International Peace Institute study of 182 peace agreements signed between 1989 and 2011 found that when women are included in peace processes, there is a 35% increase in the probability that a peace agreement will last 15 years or more. Why do I say this? It is because constitutional change is ultimately a peace process. Yet in Northern Ireland, women peacebuilders remain an underutilised resource in advancing the peace process, tackling institutionalised sectarianism and working toward constitutional change.

Women face higher levels of harassment, abuse and threats to their safety. The failure to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and a slew of other rights-based provisions has detrimentally impacted the women’s sector and stymies the capacity and confidence of women to safely engage on the topic of constitutional change.

Regarding the barriers to women’s participation in constitutional conversations, I will start by talking about representation. Women continue to be under-represented in political and public life. At present, women account for 31% of local councillors, 37% of MLAs and just 27% of MPs. Women represent 23% of chairs and 38% of all public appointments. In the Civil Service, women represent 11% of permanent secretaries and 35% of senior civil servants.

In the absence of gender equality, civic society has become the vehicle for women’s participation, with women often outnumbering men in community groups and civic projects. With appropriate funding society could significantly advance constitutional conversations.

One vehicle for civic voice was the Civic Forum under the Good Friday Agreement. The forum lasted only two years, and there is little to no political appetite for its return. Restoring the Civic Forum as envisioned in 1998 lacks ambition and would not achieve the full potential of strengthening the civic voice. In the 26 years since the agreement, there have been considerable advancements in participatory democracy structures. Rather than create a top-heavy structure like the Civic Forum, a more inclusive structure that incorporates various elements of participatory democracy can be more effective.

A recent example of taking a new approach to addressing the absence of a civic forum is the Civic Initiative, which I founded in collaboration with several civic society and community-based groups. The Civic Initiative consists of an oversight committee, content curation committee and process design committee. The initiative launched a people-led examination of socioeconomic and cultural rights under the Good Friday Agreement in 2023. It does so in four stages: regional forums and grassroots workshops; an open call for further evidence, written evidence and survey responses; a citizens’ forum of 100 citizens randomly selected through a postal lottery; and recommendations delivered to the Northern Ireland Assembly, the UK Government and the Irish Government. This structure is very different from that of the Civic Forum. A key difference is that citizens on the ground were empowered to create the agenda.

In November, the Civic Initiative will be delivering a citizens’ forum on housing. The topic of housing was selected by the people who took part in the regional workshops, 38 of which took place across Northern Ireland and in Border counties. Some 61% of participants in Civic Initiative workshops had never taken part in a similar structure or workshop before.

Funding is a significant barrier to increasing women’s voice in the area of constitutional change. The women’s sector has been systemically underfunded for decades, pushing many women’s groups into service delivery and inter-sector competition and leading to a downtick in youth participation and long-term strategies due to funding insecurity. Most community and voluntary groups operating in the women’s sector have to apply for funding on an annual basis, with no safety net or guarantees that their funding will be renewed. Imagine trying to encourage young people to go into a job where they will be put on notice on an annual basis and not know if they will be keeping their job or not.

I will point out something about the all-island women's forum that my friend and colleague highlighted. The all-island women's forum was launched a few years ago and funded through the Department of Foreign Affairs. The structure was very effective in building community networks and bringing women together across the island to look at areas of shared experience. It created very ambitious recommendations that were delivered to the Government. The funding for the all-island women's forum has been cut and not one of the recommendations that were put forward has been implemented. In the area of constitutional change, there is no specific funding scheme, and due to the precarious and limited funding currently available, many community and voluntary groups simply do not have the funding, staff, or capacity to roll out programs and work related to constitutional change.

A further barrier is violence against women. Northern Ireland is statistically one of the most dangerous places in Europe for women, with femicide levels only outstripped by Romania. Research from Ulster University suggests that 98% of women in Northern Ireland have experienced at least one form of violence or abuse in their lifetime. According to PSNI data, women account for 78% of all victims of sexual crimes and 68% of victims of domestic violence. However, it took 23 years following the Good Friday Agreement for the Northern Ireland Assembly to even agree that a strategy for tacking violence against women and girls was needed.

Regarding measures to improve representation and participation, I would recommend having ring-fenced funding with a review to implement long-term funding for women’s groups, creating a stand-alone funding programme for constitutional conversations. I also recommend making a joint commitment with the Northern Ireland Assembly to developing an all-island approach to ending gender-based violence. This was recommendation of the all-island women's forum. I also recommend launching a citizens’ forum and ensuring that forum has gender parity. Reviewing the language used around constitutional change is very important because language on this island is often so contested that we need to find a new way to reach people through the language we use.

I call for a commitment from all parties ahead of the general election here in Ireland to reserve three Seanad seats for Northern Ireland within the Taoiseach nominations. This is not the first time I have made this point but the fact that there is not actual representation from Northern Ireland in these Houses on a regular basis is detrimental. In the absence of creating a panel that is specific for Northern Ireland, there should be three seats with one from each of the main communities in Northern Ireland reserved within the Taoiseach's nominees.

Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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I thank Ms DeSouza. I apologise for the absence of some members because there are a lot of other things going on particularly the ploughing championships. That is an issue particularly for people who are standing for election.

The order we agreed earlier was Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, Alliance, Sinn Féin and Independents but that can change if someone else comes in. I am not sure if Senator Currie is coming. I hope she is because she is very anxious to be here. If she comes, we will take questions from her as well, if that is okay. The Sinn Féin representative is next.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I welcome our new members to the committee. It is great to see some of them here today and I know we have received apologies from Ms Pat Cullen and Mr. John Finucane. It is good to have new people on board and I thank them for participating. I also want to pay tribute to Mr. Francie Molloy, Ms Michelle Gildernew, Mr. Mickey Brady and Mr. Stephen Farry who contributed so much to previous terms of this committee and to our recent report on finance and economics. I want to acknowledge their hard work. When we launch the report in the North, I hope they will come along.

It is important, before going to the witnesses, to also acknowledge the public inquiry that has been announced to examine the murder of Pat Finucane after 35 years. John Finucane, who is a member of this committee, his mother Geraldine and his family have fought for many years and I know it is the wish of all of this committee that all of the families would get the truth in relation to the legacy issues. We will continue to work on that separately and to support the families in every way that we possibly can.

I thank our two witnesses for being here today. This is a very important part of the work we are doing on the Good Friday Agreement committee. This work on women and the Constitution is following on from our finance and economic report and before that, our examination of health. What we want to achieve is a lot of what the witnesses have been talking about today, namely ensuring that the hard-to-reach voices are heard. I really value their expertise in that area and the work they have done. They have so much experience as well.

We have to get to the hard-to-reach voices but we also need a framework that will capture all of the work that is being done. I see the different work that is being done right across the island. We have to prevent a reinventing the wheel situation from occurring because there is huge knowledge there. What type of framework do we need the Government to set up to allow these conversations to be had so that all of the information is captured and funding is made available? How do we ensure that funding is made available not to reinvent the wheel but to be used in the best way possible? In terms of a financial structure and a structure from the Irish Government, how would the witnesses see that working?

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

First, on hard-to-reach voices, while I was speaking about women earlier, I am extremely conscious that there are so many groups where gender is also important. It was in the back of my mind that I had not actually talked about different ethnicities, migrant populations or people with disabilities, for example. It is a difficult area because it is quite complicated. To follow on from some of what Ms DeSouza was saying, it is really important that there is a sense that to move forward, there has to be a process and a framework which is about awareness raising and education. It does not have to call itself anything much more complicated than that. It is about saying that bringing people to the point where they have the kind of understanding as well as information that enables them to participate in what is ultimately a political process is very important. So much of the community-based women's education that I and others have been involved in, much of it cross-Border, including for example the Women's Collective Ireland that I work with and that works with the Shankill and Falls women's centres, is rooted in that sense of a collective endeavour aimed at raising people's awareness. It is about making people understand what is important to them and what is of interest. People are not going to engage in something unless they think it is important but also that they can do something about it. Women are not stupid. We know that this is important but there is a sense, particularly for women who are experiencing forms of marginalisation and disadvantage, that there is nothing they can do about this. Their lives are incredibly busy so they decide there is nothing they can do about X or Y. We have to create situations which are fundamentally educational.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Can I tease this out a small bit? We had representatives of the public participation networks, PPNs, in yesterday and I would see a real role for them in this. How would Ms Smyth see it working, practically, between the local authorities, the PPNs and similar structures in the North? Is that something that could be funded under PEACEPLUS? What other ways could we do this?

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

It could be funded under PEACEPLUS. In a way, anything of that kind could be. This is all feeding into the ongoing process of peace building and reconciliation. It is also about that other element of drawing in the work that we have to do here in the South and connecting that. There is work to be done currently in each jurisdiction, so to speak, but that crucial work of bringing the two together also has a really critical place. The sorts of recommendations that Ms DeSouza was putting forward are relevant in that regard. I am not a practical policy person. I lead campaigns and do stuff like that. I do not really know who to go to in local government but I do know that we can set up a framework that has the backing of either the shared island initiative or a Department, for example, in tandem with an equivalent in the North. Of course that can be done. That is just a matter of will, of saying that we want to develop awareness and education programmes. We have examples there already like the constitutional conversations involving Ms Eilish Rooney, Dr. Joanna McMinn of Queen's University or the University of Ulster-----

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Yes, and Professor Fidelma Ashe.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

That is a very good model. So too is the Women's Collective Ireland involving the women's community groups in the North. That is another very good model. There are several models that can also be replicated for other groups. For example, I am very aware that we need to build in a lot more ethnic diversity into the kinds of education programmes that exist but that cannot really happen without some structural funding that enables that community development work to be done. At the bottom, we are talking about what happens at community level so we are talking about local government structures.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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They have access to thousands of community groups and as Ms Smyth rightly said, it is not just women. They have access to all of those who register with the PPN and so are able to do work at that rate. I also welcome the work that is being done by Professor Joanne McEvoy of Aberdeen University and UCD. We are trying to do one with Mayo County Council because obviously Mayo is one of the leaders. Is that not right Deputy Smith?

Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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Belmullet is in Mayo-----

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Yes, Belmullet and Ballycroy; I had better mention them all. I feel really excited about the work for the reason given by Ms Smyth, namely what it is possible for us to create. We have an unique opportunity to create something different, regardless of people's constitutional preference. When we see the exchange of learning across so much, it feeds into everything in terms of peace and reconciliation. As women, here and across this island, we can leave a legacy of enrichment and empowerment of communities and women, and of change.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

It is hugely strengthening of our democracy.

We have really good programmes. I have mentioned some that already exist and so has Ms DeSouza and the Deputy. They are there and yet they are consistently underfunded. Ms DeSouza is right about them being typically underfunded. As I said at the beginning, they tend to be funded for a year or two years and then that is it - end of story - and so much of all of that good work just goes out the window. We need five-year cycles on all of these programmes and it is true of the funding piece that we need three-year funding. I have been saying for the past 40 to 50 years that we need five-year funding. That is an educational cycle.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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I agree 100%. I have experience of this myself. The temptation is that if funding is provided for one year, you work with the ones that are already there - the ones that have certain capacity. You do not have time in that year to go for the additional capacity-building engagement, in particular in rural areas. I do not want to create a divide between people but there are extra challenges with transport, childcare and all of those things that people encounter.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

Yes.

Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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There is a new clock.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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Okay. There is a new clock. I know I am over time.

Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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I will take Deputy Smith now and we will come back to Deputy Conway-Walsh.

Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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That is perfect. Thank you, Chair.

Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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We must keep to the time.

Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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I apologise for being late. I missed the early part of the contributions because I was in the Dáil Chamber for Question Time. I may have to go back again later so please excuse me if I have to leave before the meeting is over. I welcome the contributions of the witnesses. It is good to have them here.

I will very much focus on the point that Deputy Conway-Walsh made about the hard-to-reach communities. A lot of us attend events and it is the same people who are at the events in a lot of instances. It is not the fault of those people who are active and want to help, but I often think of the people who are not there. I know from my own constituency of Cavan-Monaghan there are groups who travel to the North and also groups that come South on a constant basis, but it is the same group of people from the South travelling North and from the North travelling South. There is a huge cohort of people we are not reaching. We must address that issue.

At the start of Covid I remember the community sections within our local authorities drew up lists of people who needed to be contacted on a daily basis. These were people living on their own in isolated areas. From being involved in some of the groups I know the day services that are prevalent in practically every rural parish and in smaller towns as well were able to provide the list of people who attended their weekly services but they did not have contact information for the people who did not attend, who were often the people who needed support and contact.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

Yes.

Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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It is not easy to overcome that. The National Women's Council of Ireland and other national organisations use a mailing list that, by definition, cannot be comprehensive enough. Deputy Conway-Walsh's point about using the structures at local government level is very important.

We do not need new structures either. We can use the existing structures to good effect. I recall that when, as Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin announced the establishment of the shared island unit, the officials heading up the unit made a presentation to this committee. Having been involved in politics in the bad era prior to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, when there was violence and no political progress or collaboration, both the Cathaoirleach and I made a point about the work our local authorities had done in co-operation with our neighbouring local authorities. The shared island unit used the corporate knowledge that was there at local authority level, both among elected members and officials. It is a resource that is often not used enough.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

Yes, but there is a reluctance to fund or to go on funding so many of the women's community-based organisations, which are set up to reach the women who are hard to reach. They could do a lot more with more funding. As Ms DeSouza was saying, they are the ones who have-----

Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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Yes, but what I am saying is that the local authority know-how and ability can supplement and support the reach.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

Yes, but as we need to encourage local authorities to do this, there has to be that real commitment that comes-----

Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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I can only speak for my own local authorities, as we have two of them in the constituency. Deputy Tully and I represent Cavan and Monaghan, where there has never been a lack of willingness to move and to support. I have to say that.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

I know, but Women's Collective Ireland, for example, has 17 or 19 community-based women's groups around the country, including two in Monaghan. Is there one in Cavan? I am not sure, but there is one in Leitrim.

Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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No, there is not. It is in Monaghan.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

They do enormous work but their funding is minuscule, yet they are precisely those community-based groups in the Border counties that can do a huge amount of work and reach across the communities.

Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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In fairness, the local authorities are often asked to take on additional responsibilities and they are not given the funding at a national level, which is an issue. What should be done is that we should utilise more the great potential of local authorities. There is a willingness there. Most people in the Oireachtas have come through local authority membership themselves and we have ongoing contact with them on a daily basis. There is a lot of knowledge and know-how that could be utilised to supplement the work the various women's groups are doing. I know the value of the work of the women's groups and I wholeheartedly endorse it.

I have a question for Ms DeSouza, and she might come back to me on it. The Civic Initiative involves 100 randomly selected citizens. Is that from all of the island or Northern Ireland? How representative are those people? They are randomly selected people that we hope are representative but there must be some method for trying to ensure that there is a cross-section of society.

The great contribution and work of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition in a very difficult political atmosphere in the lead-up to the talks that resulted in the Good Friday Agreement often goes insufficiently recorded. Eileen Weir is in Ms DeSouza's group. In the early part of March 2023, as Chair of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, we held a meeting to mark the 25th anniversary of the agreement. It was very much based on the work of the women's groups and other women's organisations at that time. We wanted them to give us an outline of the work that they did and the challenges they faced at that time. We must ensure there is adequate support for women's organisations.

I always heard people participating in the Civic Forum being much more laudatory of its work than Ms DeSouza. I refer to people from the trade union sector and the voluntary sector who complained bitterly to me after its demise that it had not been continued by the Executive and the parties represented in Stormont at the time. She might come back on that.

Ms DeSouza also mentions that, statistically, Northern Ireland is one of the most dangerous places in Europe for women, with femicide levels outranked only by Romania. That is terrible, as is the violence against women in our own State. Of course there should be an all-Ireland approach to trying to deal with gender violence and violence against women. It is very important and nothing should get in the way of dealing with that issue in as robust and comprehensive way as is possible.

Ms Emma DeSouza:

I thank Deputy Smith very much for the excellent questions. One question is why I am more disparaging about the Civic Forum than are perhaps some others. It is because I had to critically examine the structure of the Civic Forum in order to create something different, through the Civic Initiative project. Often, when you speak with people in the ground, the people who were not part of it, have a very negative view of the structure of the Civic Forum. They see it as a space for the great and the good – people who were CEOs of civic society organisations or those who had a certain profile. They were political appointees. It was quite an aimless structure. It did not have a well-set agenda or purpose. The general view of it from the grassroots communities on the ground is that it was not for them and they do not see it as something that they could ever engage in. It is up "here" and they are all down "here". In terms of the structure of the Civic Forum, the ethos behind it is something that I am still advocating for, as we do need to have a structure similar to the Civic Forum. In 26 years there is a completely different framework available now that we can use instead. We can see the structure of the citizens' assembly here in the Republic or in other countries.

France is now bringing in a permanent citizens' assembly. Denmark has been doing consensus conferences since the 1980s. There are any number of structures and frameworks that can be used that are much more effective than the structure of the Civic Forum. If it were brought back, there would not be the participation levels one would hope for. There is an aversion at a political level in Northern Ireland to the Civic Forum, which is why you have to look at a way of approaching the same thing from a different angle.

We have worked with local authorities and public participation networks, PPNs, through the Civic Initiative Project and, yes, the resources and their networks need to be used. They are very valuable. Through the Civic Initiative, we have found a couple of different ways to reach harder to reach communities. Yes, there is a board or oversight committee and the people who sit on it include community activists and representatives of organisations that are arms into particular communities. The Women's Resource and Development Agency is connected with the women's sector, the Migrant Rights Centre is connected with ethnic minorities and YouthAction is connected with youth groups. The reason we have this kind of network is because all of these sectors are siloed. The youth sector does great work and the women's sector does great work, but they are not connecting. Never shall the two meet. This was about trying to create a structure where we could harness the work of all those different groups and bring them together under one umbrella.

The group operates in terms of having the regional structure first. We have this oversight committee, but we actioned 38 grassroots workshops across Northern Ireland and Border counties such as Monaghan, Cavan and areas in Louth. We actually piggy-backed on other community groups. If we were going into an area, we would often partner with community groups. We would not select the community groups because we did not want to be selective on who was involved, but we put out a call asking any community groups in the area that would like to be involved in this to come forward and we worked with them to get people into the room. We also partnered with groups such as PPNs and local authorities to promote the public forums. We also went into local community centres, newsagents and libraries to put up posters that stated a public forum was happening and the public was invited to attend.

We covered eight topics at the grassroots level, including poverty, human rights, political institutions, housing and education. They all link back to the Good Friday Agreement. We allowed the people who turned up to be able to say what was important to them and we narrowed those eight topics down to three. It gave us a space for people to highlight their priority issues. Through that process, we then moved into bringing in more experts and stakeholders in the second stage of the process. We brought in the business community, academia and stakeholders from across the island on an all-island basis to give us evidence and further submissions.

The third stage was the citizens' forum of 100 citizens. The way the citizens' forum works is we work with a UK-based charity called the Sortition Foundation, which essentially recruits for citizens' assemblies. It does that through a postal lottery. In the case of the citizens' forum we are doing, 25,000 letters of invitation are being posted to households across Northern Ireland. That is done by a postal lottery and any household can receive one. If a household receives an invitation to take part, any resident who is 16 years of age or older can register their interest. Of the 25,000, say 5,000 register interest. Of the 5,000 who have registered, 100 people representative of Northern Ireland will be selected. That is done by using characteristics from the census. Age, gender, ethnicity, religious background, academic achievement and where the person is regionally are all factors. It is actually spread across the Six Counties. That is how to make it representative.

On the all-island aspect, this citizens' forum on housing is only recruiting 100 citizens from Northern Ireland. Part of the reason for that was because we wanted to highlight the absence of a civic forum and any kind of vehicle like it. Under New Decade, New Approach, there is a commitment to have citizens' assemblies every year, but we have not had one yet. This is about trying to make a voice for Northern Ireland in terms of having a structure for civic engagement, but we are also acutely aware of the political context that we operate in and the aversion in Northern Ireland toward these kinds of structures. If we had done an all-island approach in this first iteration, we perhaps would have had more political pushback to the structure. There is a need to normalise this kind of engagement in Northern Ireland first before an all-island approach can be taken. There is absolutely nothing to stop an all-island forum. We could have sent out the invitations across the island through the Sortition Foundation. That can be done. In the future, this structure could very easily be replicated and recruitment could be done on an all-island basis.

Ms Sorcha Eastwood:

I thank Ms DeSouza and Ms Smyth for their contributions. This is a very timely session. At the minute, women, not just in the North but on the island of Ireland, are living through incredibly dangerous times. We can all do much more on an all-island basis to address some of the critical issues people have raised, whether that is taking up more space in the public square or looking at some of the societal barriers. The societal barriers do not stop women from coming forward. I have never come across women who did not want to have their voices heard, but I have come across societal barriers that make it much more difficult for women and other groups in our society to be heard.

One of the key things for me - I do not want to pre-empt some of the stuff that may come through the health stream - is the issue of the third shift, where we talk about women having to take on more responsibilities, whether that is in the home, caring for other family members or whatever it may be. From my perspective, we are not doing enough to break down enough of those barriers to enable more fluid and flexible ways of enabling women to be more fully heard. I am thinking in terms of carer's leave and flexible working. These are very practical things that will make a huge difference in women's lives. I obviously take my seat in Westminster and one of the Adjournment debates we heard recently was about the issue of special educational needs. Obviously that impacts everybody in the family, not just women, but often it is predominantly the woman, mummy, step-mum, carer, guardian or whoever it may be who will often have to become the advocate for their child or whoever it is they are caring for. In a way, I believe there is scope for much more to be done on an all-island basis whenever it comes to addressing those issues that so often predominantly and disproportionately have an impact on women.

I am very interested to hear what Ms DeSouza thinks about how the all-island approach is working for women in the North. Does she have any views on that?

Ms Emma DeSouza:

In short, I do not think it is working well. My experience is that I started with the National Women's Council of Ireland in 2021. That was my first entry into working more deliberatively within the women's sector. I found there was a lot of separation North and South. I felt that the women's sector had become siloed and much of that has to do with funding restrictions. A lot of work needs to happen to increase capacity on an all-island basis and to see these things as an all-island issue.

The All-Island Women's Forum, of which I was chair and facilitator for its first term, was extremely effective and created very robust recommendations that looked at things such as having a permanent space for civic engagement, having an all-island media strategy or some kind of North-South collaboration that would increase women's voices within the media landscape and look at things such as violence against women and cross-Border education. We worked very hard to create those recommendations and the implementation of any one of them would be effective. Since that time, the All-Island Women's Forum has lost its funding and that structure is very limited now in terms of what it will be able to do in the future, as is the Encounters programme that my friend Ms Smyth was also working on.

As regards a regular, permanent structure, there is not enough regular engagement on an all-island basis and there is not enough funding available. If the women's sector were given more strategic funding, it would be much more effective. There is so much capacity within the sector to address the areas Ms Eastwood mentioned, including health, social mobility and education. From my experience of the Civic Initiative regional workshops looking at those particular issues - we also had a woman-specific one for that - there were so many fantastic, innovative and ambitious ideas at a community level that would make this place so much better, but they are not being heard, harnessed, supported or funded.

What this place needs is a permanent all-island focus and a structure that is going to be able to achieve it. We could look at having an independent body of some kind that is properly funded and that will bring together all those community groups and all the different arms, including the business community, academia and the different elements. However, it has to be something that is not going to disappear in two years.

Ms Sorcha Eastwood:

I agree. We do not automatically equate women's voices with the issues of autonomy and finance, which is a real bugbear of mine. It really helps to have women around the table and they should be at every table when it comes to the purse strings, who wants them, where the money goes and why. One of the things I would really like to see is more security around those funding streams. In the North, we have issues right now with the UK shared prosperity fund, which is a legacy of the Brexit fallout. It would be interesting to hear the committee members’ views on women and economic and fiscal policy, and what can be done to help us.

Ms Emma DeSouza:

There needs to be adequate, specific and ring-fenced funding for women that is going to stay within the sector. There were previous questions on frameworks and structures. I believe something needs to be created that is going to be big and independent enough to hear all of those voices. There needs to be a joint commitment from the Governments on how to take an all-island approach to specifically address some of the issues impacting women, specifically around violence and health. We have not seen the level of co-operation that is needed up to this point. For me, it would have to be around creating a structure. It needs to be something new and we need to look at how to choose the language around the structure so we get people to really participate in it.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

I very much support what Ms DeSouza has just been saying, which is absolutely true. It was certainly a source of disappointment to me that funding from the shared island unit in regard to women had to be fought for, in the first instance, and, second, was not sufficient and was a tiny proportion of the overall fund of the unit. It now seems to have completely dried up. That gives us an indication that there is no understanding of just how important it is to invest in the sector, if I can call women a sector, which seems peculiar. Of course, this is a historical situation that keeps being repeated. We have to keep coming back with questions like “Why did that thing only run for two years?” or “Why was there not more investment?”

One of the things that emerged from the All-Island Women's Forum became apparent during the two residential sessions. My experience of the work we have done North and South over the years is that when we bring women together for a couple of hours, that is great and it does something, but when we bring them together for two or three days to work together and also to spend social time together, we get huge breakthroughs. There is no silo anymore and they are simply working together as people. There is the notion of co-operation and how they can work together to tackle the issues of, for example, gender-based violence, reproductive rights, childcare or care for children with disabilities. All of that becomes part of the everyday conversation and the suspicions and fears that exist in both parts of the island for the other part are quickly dissipated.

It is a mystery to me why smart, intelligent policymakers do not get that point because it is very basic. You bring people together and give them the possibility within a structure of getting to know one another, and they do. They find what they have in common. They also find what they do not agree about and if they are there for long enough, they start to try to work that out, talk it through and see which bits they can go with and which bits do not actually work. There is a big change in cultural attitude still to be made in this particular arena when talking about constitutional reconfiguration and so on. Gender really matters, and that gender means women and it means investment in women.

Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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I want to be associated with the welcome to our new members of the committee and also to acknowledge the work of the former members.

I welcome Ms Smyth and Ms DeSouza and thank them for their contributions. It is obvious from what they have said and from what I know myself that there is very important work ongoing, with women meeting and discussing issues of importance. There is great value in that but there is also a sense that, in some way, it can be disjointed in that it is not leading to real change. I am very interested in what Ms Smyth said about the Encounters programme, which brought groups with a shared interest together and made the connection with the assumption that that would develop, which it did in some cases but not in others, perhaps due to a lack of funding or support. Women's Aid and the Women's Aid Federation Northern Ireland have reconnected and are doing important work, and we know gender-based violence is a huge issue. Has there been any evaluation of the Encounters programme? Why was it only limited to one year? There are so many different groups and areas of interest.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

That is a fair question. We would very much like to have done an evaluation but there was no funding for it and, in fact, there was minimal funding for the programme. While it was not so much an admission as a hope that bringing like-minded groups together would open up the possibility of co-operative work, what can be accomplished in a two-hour encounter is very limited. The fact that anything at all emerges from it is kind of a miracle and a tribute to the women who were involved in those conversations. Where it tended to work best was where there were two organisations meeting up, for example, the Women's Aid Federation and Women's Aid. They had a prior connection and although it had dissipated a bit, there was already some kind of connection, which meant the encounter gave them a boost to move forward and reawakened their appetite to work together. It was a similar situation with the Rainbow Project and LGBT Ireland and those occasions worked very well, as did those involving the Women's Collective Ireland and the Shankill and Falls centres.

Others were much more difficult. We had a meeting in Leitrim between Herstory and Women in Loyalism. It was a very interesting meeting and conversation but it was difficult for it to move forward. It would have needed further encounters and more time to develop and mature into something that might happen practically on the ground. Although it was still worth doing, there were areas that we could not really reach. We wanted very much to bring Traveller women from North and South together but it was very difficult to set that up. We would have needed a community development worker working with us to help us with that and also to further the encounters between migrant groups.

In all of that, it was about mapping out a good number of the groups that we want to be able to reach. It was almost a kind of a learning as to where it works and where we need a lot more structure and funding.

It is really about having structures in place that are funded. We have often made the point that anything this committee can do in terms of recommendations for furthering this kind of co-operative, collaborative work is so important.

One of the issues that really struck me during the Encounters programme and in some subsequent work with women in which I was involved is that we focus a lot, rightly, on the situation in terms of how things work for women in the North. Often, however, there is not enough emphasis or understanding that women in the South, in community-based situations across the board, have very little understanding and experience of the North of Ireland. It may be different for Deputy Tully and others in Border counties. However, we had a group from Kerry, for example, participating in a women's collective, who met with a group from the North. This was not part of the Encounters programme; it was another programme. The Kerry women had never been to the North of Ireland and out of the group from the North of Ireland, only one had been to Dublin. The fear, suspicion and misperceptions were enormous. Then there was a relief and what can only be described as a kind of joy in discovering we are all just real people.

That opening up of dialogue leads, in turn, to at least the possibility of broaching the difficult political issues. They are difficult, as we all know, but they cannot even be broached until the other fears and suspicions are addressed and the ice is broken. These are processes that take a long time. I always wanted to be able to bring taoisigh, tánaistí, Deputies, Ministers and I do not know whatnot into those environments to look at the work that can be done if there is a structure, some patience and a real willingness to listen. It is about sitting back and listening to what is happening there.

Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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I often say in this committee that, as women, we have a lot more in common, regardless of what part of the globe we are from, than we have differences.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

We start off with what there is in common, which gets worked out, and then we can move on to what people do not have in common and what the differences are.

Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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It is about breaking down the barriers and seeking understanding.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

Yes, and understanding the different histories. For the majority of people, not just women, there is not much understanding of history. Bringing it to that point is so important for what we might call the eventual outcome on this island, which I hope will be reunification. That cannot happen without there being mutual understanding. It will not and cannot happen without that.

Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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The committee engages with the shared island unit. One of the issues we can raise with it is why the funding for the all-island women's forum was cut and why the recommendations in that regard were not taken on board.

Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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The Deputy might propose that we invite officials from the shared island unit in to answer that question. It is critical to what she is discussing.

Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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I propose that we raise it with the shared island unit. Absolutely.

Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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I will do that straight away.

Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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It is really important.

A lot of female constituents come to me who have been in violent relationships. One of the huge difficulties they face is dealing with the justice system, which is very much a male-dominated system, including the courts, the Garda and the prison system. That is an issue given the prevalence of gender-based violence across the island. As Ms DeSouza said, it is extremely prevalent in the North. There needs to be an awareness of that and a real change brought about in terms of understanding how the courts system does not support people in those situations.

Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

Absolutely. Legislation differs between North and South and the two judicial systems do not work in identical ways. However, there is a lot of common ground. What is very similar North and South is that it is very difficult for women going through those systems. I understand there is quite a lot of co-operative work going on in this regard. Certainly, there is an exchanging of information between Women's Aid Federation Northern Ireland and Women's Aid here. They are both organisations that have huge service responsibilities. Having the space and time to look at the co-operative work that could be done requires some separate funding because of the service responsibilities in each case. I am chair of Women's Aid at present. I know it does not have a spare halfpenny. Having meetings with our colleagues in Belfast or Derry is very important but it is really hard to find the staff and time to do it, and it is just as hard for those colleagues in the North. The possibilities in this regard absolutely are there. However, we are in an emergency situation every single day. I do not have to tell the Deputy that. To see some focus of attention being placed simply on that one area would be absolutely incredible. It really would be fantastic.

Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Ms Smyth.

Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)
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A few members had to go into the Chamber to ask questions. I will make a few points before we conclude.

It is very hard to read about and watch what is happening nationally and internationally in terms of violence against women in particular. I think of that court case involving the vile, evil male in France. The number of people involved in that is absolutely appalling and shocking. I agree entirely with what has been said in terms of the role of this committee. We are happy to take on board the points and constructive suggestions the witnesses have made and to seek answers for them. Deputy Tully's point regarding the shared island unit and the funding is very important. We will follow that up immediately. Officials from that unit attend the committee approximately twice a year. They will be coming in again but we will get answers in the meantime. We certainly will articulate and support the views and proposals both of the witnesses made. We are happy to follow up on those points. We will concentrate on the shared island unit issue and try to get a real outcome on that.

On another point raised, by way of explanation, Oireachtas Members can no longer be members of local authorities. As such, we do not know about the nitty-gritty of the issues that affect women's groups in different counties unless they come to us personally as TDs or convey the information to us. It is important to follow up the point about cuts to women's programmes and how to achieve more accountability in that regard. I am not sure what is the best way to do that. We could write to the Minister or to the local authorities. Perhaps we should discuss this and try to find a vehicle for interrogating the points made with each of the councils and getting answers.

I thank the witnesses for their time this morning. I have known Ms DeSouza for a number of years and have always found her very articulate. She gets to the core of the issues. I am very conscious of her contribution. I again thank the witnesses for their attendance.