Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Citizen's Assembly on Gender Equality made three recommendations that centred on the Constitution: to insert gender equality and non-discrimination; to remove the reference of women within the home; and to amend Article 41 to protect family life to make sure that children in the family are not discriminated against whether their parents are married or not. As I said, great work was done both by the citizen's assembly in particular during Covid-19, and then at the Oireachtas committee thereafter. An interdepartmental group has been established to try to progress a lot of that work but there is no question of not having had public consultation. It was a broad citizen's assembly in the way that there have been citizen's assemblies. As a deliberative democracy principle, Ireland has set itself apart through the use of citizen's assemblies to look at various different issues. We have had good success in that. The analysis of that by political scientists is that it is a good deliberative democracy model which is not unique to Ireland but has worked extremely well in making sure there is broad consultation, quite apart from the broad democratic legitimacy of the people engaged in that work at every level. I find the Senator's approach to the notion of the Government trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, in those circumstances, curious.