Glimpse #3: Ireland vs Distrust
The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 hit Ireland especially hard. By 2009, with citizens feeling they were being punished for something that was not their fault, trust in government was among the lowest in Europe.
To give you a sense of how bad things were, 27% of the UK population say they trust government in 2024; the corresponding figure in Ireland in 2009 was 10%.
Since then, however, there has been a remarkable turnaround. By 2022, Ireland was one of only five countries across all 37 OECD nations — covering most of Europe and beyond — to record public trust at above 50%.
How did the Irish achieve this? You guessed it: by involving people.
Repealing the 8th: the decision to legalise access to abortion
The repeal of the 8th amendment to the Irish constitution, which effectively made abortion illegal, was confirmed by a two-thirds majority at a national referendum on 25th May 2018. Instead, access to abortion was legalised, up to 12 weeks. It is a moment represents the high point of this story.
A total ban on abortion had been part of the constitution since 1983. The Irish government acknowledged itself to be deeply stuck on the issue, with parties on either side of the political spectrum concerned about alienating their bases with any form of compromise.
The solution was to return the question directly to the people, not by going directly to referendum, but by first convening a Citizens’ Assembly. This is a process which sees a small, representative sample of a population brought together to work together intensively to learn about every aspect of an issue, deliberate on the options, and make recommendations — in this case to a recommendation as to whether the Irish constitution should be revised, and if so, how.
99 Irish citizens were accordingly selected, initially invited at random but then filtered to create a group that would be representative of the national population on all key demographics. Over five weekends spread out over five months, this Citizens’ Assembly shared stories in small groups, received evidence from a panel of 40 expert witnesses representing a range of viewpoints, heard directly from women affected by the laws, and from 17 campaigning and lobbying groups. All proceedings were fully transparent to the public and media, and the Assembly received a great deal of coverage. The outcome was that the Assembly members put back to the politicians the recommendation to legalise access to abortion up to 12 weeks, subject to a confirmatory national referendum.
Still there was concern: this proposal was initially seen as too extreme and out of step with Middle Ireland, and there were significant and understandable fears about launching a referendum process in Ireland in 2018, a country and a time deeply affected by the ongoing reverberations of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union almost exactly two years before.
The referendum went ahead, however, and in the event the preceding steps made it— in the words of the political commentator Fintan O’Toole — “immune,” or at least much hardier, against the disinformation, interference and manipulation that had affected not just the Brexit process but so many elections and referenda in recent years.
Why? Because rather than the arguments being exchanged over the heads of the population, “people like me” who had been part of the Assembly were on national media saying: I was involved in the process, I thought that at first, I changed my mind.
Ultimately, the people of Ireland did agree with the Assembly members. 66.4% voted for repealing the eighth amendment, removing the ban on abortion, and legalising unrestricted access up to 12 weeks.
For present purposes, the most significant thing about this is not so much that legislative outcome — hugely significant as it is, especially in the current global context. The broader social and political outcomes were arguably even more profound. The conversation around the referendum actually reduced polarisation, generating greater empathy on both sides for the feelings, experiences and perspectives of others.
Many “Yes” campaigners leant into the new space of empathy opened up by the Assembly process by engaging everyone they could, rather than writing off typically conservative sectors of society as a lost cause. As Fintan O’Toole put it, “It turned out that a lot of people were sick of being typecast... It turned out that a lot of people like to be treated as complex, intelligent and compassionate individuals.” A majority of farmers and more than 40% of the over-65s voted Yes.
This was a process through which people came together, heard one another, and felt involved and trusted by their government.
The backstory: power to the people, initiated by the people
I’ve known about the Assembly on abortion for a while, and wrote about it in CITIZENS. What I didn’t know until very recently, though, was that the whole process only came about because of what a little group of academics and active citizens did back in the days of the financial crisis.
It all began in 2009, with two political science academics: Jane Suiter of Dublin City University and David Farrell of University College Dublin. They convened a small group of their peers to discuss what might be done in response to that deep crisis of trust. Out of these conversations came the idea of running an independent Citizens’ Assembly to develop responses to the crises facing the country with the public.
The group came up with the name “We The Citizens” for their project, managed to get a philanthropic grant of a little over 100,000 euros, and recruited a cohort of 133 volunteers to help make it happen. After holding a series of open regional meetings and surveying a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 people to frame up the questions that would be discussed and to recruit their participants, they then hosted a formal Citizens’ Assembly with 100 members over a single weekend.
The two main items on the Assembly agenda were, first, how the government should balance tax rises with spending cuts and public asset sales in the face of the fiscal crisis, and second, how to rebuild trust in democracy in the country. On the former, fascinatingly, there was a huge shift in opinion away from cuts and asset sales and towards increasing taxes; and in terms of rebuilding trust, there was significant will to embed processes like these into the workings of government.
The smartest aspect of all this, in my view, was the attitude to government that the organisers took. They didn’t ask for permission or campaign for government to do this process, but nor did they position what they were doing in antipathy to government. Instead, they invited politicians to observe the process, and submitted a full report to government once it was complete.
I would describe this as creating the space for politics to move into, in much the same spirit as Gov Zero in Taiwan in Glimpse #1 — and it worked. You can trace the lineage directly through from We The Citizens, to the Irish Constitutional Convention that ran from December 2012 to May 2014, to the establishment of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly and its deliberations on abortion, as well as marriage equality, biodiversity, and much more besides. Suiter, Farrell, and their collaborators made it possible for Irish politicians to see a whole new way of doing things — one that has since become a core part of the country’s system of governance.
Where are they now?
There can be no doubt that these approaches have made a major difference to trust in government and in democracy in Ireland, as the data at the top of this piece show. But even here, the picture is not all rosy.
In recent months, two more constitutional referenda have been held in Ireland off the back of Assembly deliberations — and both were solidly rejected. It seems likely this was a factor in the surprise resignation of Leo Varadkar as Taoiseach, and it has led some to call for the Citizens’ Assembly structure to be abandoned, or at least much restrained in its scope. The whys and wherefores of the situation are contested: my own view (shared by David Farrell among others) is that the situation arose more because government tried to filter the Assembly recommendations inappropriately and without due transparency, rather than because the Assembly itself was flawed. If you want to get into the detail, I’d highly recommend DemocracyNext’s discussion in their recent newsletter.
But the important point for my present purposes is that even in Ireland, widely heralded as a world leader in new approaches to democracy (a status exemplified by the video below), we still only really have a glimpse of what Citizen Democracy might look like, not a clear picture. The gravitational pull of the old models is strong, and while there are powerful lessons to learn here, this is not going to be a case of a “copy and paste” rollout of a simple success story.
I want to look at one last Glimpse, from a very different part of the world, before turning to what next.
***
This is the EIGHTH piece in a writing exercise I’m undertaking at the start of 2024 to figure out what I see as the work that needs doing in the world, and the work I need to do. Check out the Introduction for the overall framing, Clarity Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 for the definition of the challenge, Imagination Part 1 for the reason why I’m looking for Glimpses of Citizen Democracy, and other glimpses in Taiwan’s Covid response and Wales’ response to the climate emergency. If any of it sparks something in you, post a comment or email me, I’d love your thoughts. If you want to stay in touch, you can join my mailing list here.
