OPINION: WHEN I got involved with We The Citizens, I had some ideas of the type of issues that people would raise at the events we held around the country this spring. I expected that top of that list would be the economy.
I thought there would be fury and blame. However, while there was anger, much of it had been channelled into suggestions for improving Ireland.
In our quest to show how Ireland could benefit from citizens coming together in new forms of public decision-making, we first had to find out what issues people cared about. At citizens’ events from Cork to Donegal, we listened and took note.
We then polled 1,200 people randomly chosen to ask about the issues raised at these events. From these we invited some to take part in a citizens’ assembly in Dublin last month. We had 100 people in a room discussing issues for a day and a half. Citizens’ assemblies such as those which have operated in Canada and the Netherlands can operate over a year and have full government support, including the right to put their proposal to a referendum. They ask ordinary citizens to discuss issues normally reserved for politicians and others.
Citizens’ assemblies allow participants to make informed decisions on issues about which people tend not to think in much depth – and on which they are often inclined to come to a conclusion too easily.
The assemblies also work well on issues where politicians themselves have vested interests, such as in the design of the political system. The process requires citizens to think about and discuss issues intensively so they can come to more nuanced and thoughtful conclusions, which often take into account other peoples’ interests, not just their own. As such, citizens’ assemblies are as much a challenge to citizens as they are to political elites.
One of the things that surprised me most in listening to participants at our events across the country was that education seemed to be a major issue. So, in the run-up to our citizens’ assembly, we put the question of education in our survey of Irish people.
The poll showed people have lots of confidence in our schools – fully 88 per cent say they have “quite a lot” or “a great deal of confidence” in our schools, which compares to 29 per cent for religious groups, 34 per cent for trade unions or 32 per cent for the Dáil.
While we tend to approve of schools in general, people are less complimentary about the education system, and are looking for change. Certainly, many complain the system has let us down. Employers have claimed Irish school-leavers lack basic skills.
Time and again, at We The Citizens events around the country, people were concerned that schools don’t produce rounded citizens who understand that they live in a society; that most school-leavers are not competent citizens to the extent of having basic knowledge of the political system, or of having the basic understanding that their actions affect others in society.
The Ipsos MRBI poll we conducted shows most people agreed with this. Sixty-one per cent strongly agreed schools should be focused on creating responsible Irish citizens, and just 2 per cent disagreed. Almost half strongly agreed civic and social education should be a fundamental part of children’s education. This might not be that surprising, but it shows the Irish people are not content for their schools to remain unchanged. Many of those who participated at our regional meetings expressed the desire that Ireland should never find herself in this crisis situation again. To many, the answer lay in more citizenship-minded education.
In one area of education there is a reform agenda being pursued by the Government: to divest the Catholic Church of patronage of some of the more than 90 per cent of schools it controls in the primary sector. We asked people how they would feel if most primary and secondary schools were to become multi-denominational, ie taken out of church control. Forty-six per cent said they would welcome this, a figure that was pretty standard across age ranges and social classes. Thirty-six per cent said they were against it. Even in Connacht/Ulster where people were less supportive of the move, more were still in favour than against. Indeed, there is a pretty strong groundswell of support for the notion of separating church and State generally: 65 per cent of people feel strongly they should be separated.
It is obvious there is more debate to be undertaken on the issue than the initial question on confidence in our institutions would suggest. As we found over the weekend of the citizens’ assembly, when we drill down into people’s opinions they become more nuanced and may even change.
On a tablecloth at our citizens’ event in Tallaght, one participant wrote that “education changed Ireland in the 1960s, it can renew Ireland again”. Let’s hope this is so.
Fiach Mac Conghail is a Senator, director of the Abbey Theatre and chairman of We The Citizens. The academic team behind the surveys consists of Prof David Farrell of UCD, Dr Jane Suiter of UCC, Dr Eoin O’Malley of DCU and Dr Elaine Byrne of TCD. Ipsos MRBI conducted the fieldwork for this study among a nationally representative sample of adults aged 18+. In total, 1,242 interviews were conducted