Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I propose to take Questions Nos. 13 to 18, inclusive, together.

The Government recently agreed that a Citizens’ Assembly be convened to bring forward proposals to advance gender equality that challenge the remaining barriers, social norms and attitudes that facilitate gender discrimination towards girls and boys, women and men; in particular, to seek to ensure women's full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in the workplace, politics and public life; that recognise the importance of early years parental care and seek to facilitate greater work-life balance; to examine the social responsibility of care and women and men's co-responsibility for care, especially within the family; and following on from that to prioritise the proposals, which may include policy, legislative or constitutional change, having regard to the legal requirements and the costs versus the potential impact. Following an establishment phase, it is expected that the assembly will be up and running by end October 2019 and will run for a maximum of six months.

Following consideration of the outcome of the plebiscites on directly elected mayors for Limerick, Cork and Waterford on 24 May, a further Dublin Citizens' Assembly will be convened to consider the best model of local government for Dublin and, in particular, the issue, but not exclusively, of a directly elected mayor and his or her powers. This assembly will run subsequent to the assembly on gender equality. When it comes to local government, Dublin is much more complicated than Cork, Limerick and Galway because of the existence in Dublin of four authorities with four mayors. We will need to consider different ideas on an appropriate model for how local government could work given that there are four local authorities to which many people feel a connection, but others do not.

A Citizens’ Assembly may be valuable as a way to ask the people of Dublin what they believe could work best. I will bring the detailed proposals of the Dublin assembly to Government shortly. As with the Convention on the Constitution and the previous Citizens’ Assembly, I expect the establishment of these assemblies will be the subject of a resolution of each House of the Oireachtas and that the assemblies will also report to both Houses of the Oireachtas and not just to the Government.

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