Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 5:

To delete all words after “notes that” and substitute the following:“— membership of the Assembly will consist of 100 persons as follows:

— a Chairperson to be appointed by the Government;

— 66 citizens entitled to vote at a referendum, randomly selected so as to be broadly representative of Irish society; and

— 33 members of the Houses of the Oireachtas, so as to be impartially representative of the Houses;

— substitutes may be appointed subject to the selection criteria above, who will be entitled to contribute to the proceedings and vote in their own name;

— the Assembly will agree its own rules of procedure for the effective conduct of its business in as economical a manner as possible;

— the Assembly will first make a report and recommendation on the matter set out at (i) above to the Houses of the Oireachtas before 30th November, 2016;

— the Assembly will report and make recommendations to the Houses of the Oireachtas on each remaining matter as soon as it has completed its deliberations, but in any event not later than one year from the date of the first Assembly meeting;

— the Assembly will also be asked to consider such other matters as may be referred to it;

— an Expert Advisory Group will be established to assist the work of the Assembly in terms of preparing information and advice;

— the mechanism for the selection of members of the Expert Advisory Group should be transparent, open to scrutiny and verifiably independent;

— the Assembly may invite and accept submissions from interested bodies and will seek such expert advice as it considers desirable;

— all matters before the Assembly will be determined by a majority of the votes of members present and voting, other than the Chairperson who will have a casting vote in the case of an equality of votes; and

— the Government will provide in the Houses of the Oireachtas a response to each recommendation of the Assembly and, if accepting the recommendation, will indicate the timeframe it envisages for the holding of any related referendum, which shall take place no later than four months after the receipt by the House of the Oireachtas of the Assembly’s report and recommendation.”

We are pressing the amendment, but it is described inaccurately by the sheet that the Government has submitted, which does not deal accurately with what the amendment seeks to do, namely, to apply to the assembly the recommendations of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties that Members of the Oireachtas be part of the body and report back in a tighter timeframe. The Government's response therefore does not even deal with those issues. The intention behind the amendment is to base the assembly on the same model as the Constitutional Convention in order that Deputies and Senators would be included, rather than a separate stage.

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