Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies: randomly selected citizens before national votes

Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies are bodies of randomly selected citizens, set up by resolution of both Houses of the Oireachtas, that hear evidence, deliberate and send recommendations to parliament; six were held between 2012 and 2023 on topics from same-sex marriage and abortion to biodiversity loss and drug policy.⁠¹ Two of them preceded constitutional referendums that voters approved in 2015 and 2018, and a later assembly on gender equality preceded two referendums that voters rejected in 2024 after the government changed the recommended wording.⁠^2,3,4 The Irish record is the strongest evidence anywhere that a mini-public can feed a national decision, and also clear evidence that elected officials decide whether and how it does.

What happened

Ireland’s assemblies followed one another in a sequence, and each was designed differently.

Convention on the Constitution (2012 to 2014). Both Houses of the Oireachtas approved a resolution in July 2012 creating a convention of 66 randomly selected citizens, 33 politicians from the Oireachtas and the Northern Ireland Assembly, and an independent chair.⁠⁵ It considered eight topics set by the resolution and two it chose itself, and produced nine reports.⁠⁵ At its April 13 to 14, 2013 meeting on same-sex marriage, the ballot table in its report records 79 for changing the Constitution to allow civil marriage for same-sex couples, 19 against and 1 with no opinion, and 78 for a directive amendment requiring the state to legislate.⁠⁶ The convention received 1,077 submissions on the topic.⁠⁶ The citizens’ assembly website states that the government accepted six recommendations for constitutional change and held referendums in May 2015 on marriage equality and on the age threshold for presidential candidates.⁠⁵ On May 22, 2015 the marriage amendment passed and the presidential age amendment was rejected.⁠²

Citizens’ Assembly (2016 to 2018). After the February 2016 election, the government set up a second body, this time without politicians: 99 randomly selected citizens chaired by a Supreme Court judge, Mary Laffoy.⁠^7,8 Its five topics were the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution (which protected the life of the unborn), an aging population, climate change, how referendums are held, and fixed-term parliaments.⁠⁷ Courant reports that the assembly deliberated on abortion over five weekends from November 2016 to April 2017 and received over 12,000 submissions.⁠⁸ In April 2017, 87% of members voted not to retain the Eighth Amendment in its existing form, and 64% favored allowing termination without restriction as to reasons.⁠⁹ A parliamentary joint committee reached a similar position, and a referendum followed.⁠⁸

Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality (2020 to 2021). Established by Oireachtas resolution in July 2019, it had a chair and 99 citizens, and its mandate included the social responsibility of care.⁠¹⁰ It recommended deleting Article 41.2, the constitutional text on the role of “woman in the home,” and replacing it with gender-neutral language obliging the state to take reasonable measures to support care in the home and the wider community.⁠⁴

Three assemblies in 2022 and 2023. The Dublin Citizens’ Assembly (established February 2022) had 67 randomly selected Dublin residents, 12 councillors and a chair, and examined a directly elected mayor for Dublin.⁠¹¹ The Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss (established February 2022) agreed 159 recommendations, 73 high-level and 86 sector-specific, at its final meeting on January 21, 2023.⁠¹² The Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use met six times between April and October 2023, and its report, with 36 recommendations, was submitted to the Oireachtas in December 2023 and published in January 2024; the assembly’s page describes the recommendations as “currently being considered by the Government”.⁠¹³ The official site states that “there is currently no Citizens’ Assembly in operation”.⁠¹

How it worked

Ireland’s assemblies share a basic design, set by resolution rather than by a permanent statute.

Legal basis. Each assembly was created by resolution of both Houses.⁠¹ Courant notes that the Citizens’ Assembly Act 2019 is a short act that allows the register of electors to be used to select members, “without any other specification as to the shape, power or frequency” of assemblies.⁠⁸ Nothing in law requires the government to hold a referendum on, or legislate for, any recommendation.

Selection. Members are recruited by a research firm; the Gender Equality assembly’s page describes members as “randomly selected in accordance with best recruitment practice”.⁠¹⁰ For the 2016 to 2018 assembly, the agreed method, carried out by RED C Research and Marketing, was door-to-door recruitment.⁠¹⁴ In February 2018 the assembly reported that seven replacement members had instead been recruited by phone through one recruiter’s friends and family; a randomized check by the secretariat caught it, and the majority view on four questions about how referendums are held could not be determined.⁠¹⁴ The existing overview at comparative cases covers this incident; the point here is that the check existed and worked.

Process. Members heard experts and advocates, read submissions, deliberated in facilitated small groups and then voted by secret ballot on recommendations.⁠^6,8 The 2013 marriage report shows the format: experts in law, a panel of interest groups, roundtable discussions and a ballot on a short list of questions.⁠⁶ The report notes that a related issue, religious freedom and freedom of expression in the context of faith-based schools, “was raised but was not put on the ballot paper”.⁠⁶

Agenda. The government and parliament set the topics. Courant lists the powers politicians held: whether to set up an assembly, when, on which topics, for how long, who supervises it, its budget and, “more crucially,” what happens to its recommendations.⁠⁸ The 2012 convention could add two topics of its own; it chose economic, social and cultural rights, and Courant reports that the government rejected both recommendations on that topic outright.⁠⁸

Cost. The 2016 to 2018 assembly lists total costs of €1,505,960.90 from August 2016 to June 2018, excluding salary and office administration costs.⁠⁷

Measured results

The measurable outcomes of Ireland’s assemblies are referendum results, government responses and counts of recommendations.

On the Convention on the Constitution, Courant counts 10 topics leading to 40 recommendations, of which “only three were submitted to referendum,” with some rejected and others postponed “for years, possibly forever”⁠⁸ The official site reports six recommendations for constitutional change accepted by the government.⁠⁵

The closeness between the 2016 to 2018 assembly’s vote and the 2018 result is notable: 64% of members favored termination without restriction as to reasons,⁠⁹ and 66.4% of voters approved repeal,⁠¹⁶ although the two votes asked different questions. Farrell, Suiter and Harris, in Irish Political Studies (2019), describe the two mini-publics as playing “a significant role in supporting key referendums,” and argue that the sequence shows “a degree of ‘systemization’ of deliberation”.⁠¹⁷

Failures and criticisms

Ireland’s assemblies are criticized from several directions, including by scholars who study them closely.

Selective listening. Courant argues that while some recommendations became law, “some others were not even debated,” and that elected officials practiced “’selective listening’ or ‘cherry picking’”.⁠⁸ On this view, a government can use an assembly to legitimize reforms it already wanted and set aside the rest.

The agenda was political. Courant observes that the reform movement grew out of an economic crisis, yet none of the eight topics politicians gave the 2012 convention concerned the economy.⁠⁸ Politicians also removed themselves from the 2016 assembly; Courant argues the real reason was that abortion was politically dangerous and most politicians “refused to take a public stance”.⁠⁸ Critics who see assemblies as a way to shift responsibility for hard choices can point to this.

The government changed the wording, and voters said no. The Gender Equality assembly recommended an obligation on the state to “take reasonable measures to support care in the home and the wider community”; the Oireachtas committee proposed similar language.⁠⁴ The government instead proposed that the state “strive to support” care, and only care within families.⁠⁴ Seána Glennon, writing in April 2024, argues that the government departed from the assembly’s recommendation, offered no concrete policy plan, and left it unclear what problem the amendments solved.⁠⁴ Voters rejected both by wide margins.⁠^3,4 The failure is attributable at least in part to decisions after the assembly, but it also shows that an assembly’s support cannot carry a referendum on its own.

The assembly may be ahead of, or apart from, the public. In 2017 the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, responded to the abortion recommendations by saying “I honestly don’t know if the public would go as far as what the Citizens’ Assembly have recommended,” as quoted by Courant.⁠⁸ Critics who held the opposite view on abortion argued that the assembly’s process favored one side; the sources verified for this page do not establish such bias, and the 2018 vote broadly matched the assembly. In 2024, by contrast, the gap was real in the other direction: the assembly’s broad reform agenda was not matched by the electorate’s verdict on the government’s narrower texts.⁠⁴

Recruitment can fail. The 2018 incident showed that a single recruiter could compromise the random selection that gives an assembly its claim to represent the public.⁠¹⁴ The response, an audit and the exclusion of affected results, is a model; the fact that it happened is a warning.

Weak institutional footing. Courant argues that Irish success “suffered from its own limitations and problems, directly related to its lack of institutionalization,” and contrasts Ireland with Canadian provinces where governments committed in advance to putting assembly proposals to voters.⁠⁸

The case for the defense. Supporters answer that the assemblies helped break deadlocks politicians could not, that the 2018 result tracked the assembly closely,⁠^9,16 and that Farrell and colleagues see a growing systemization of deliberation in Irish constitutional review.⁠¹⁷

What transferred and what did not

Ireland’s example spread widely as an idea, less reliably as an institution. Courant calls Ireland “a truly unique case” and tests the claim that an “Irish model” is replicable.⁠⁸ He notes that British Columbia’s citizens’ assembly proposal won over 58% in a referendum but missed a 60% threshold, and that Ontario’s proposal won only 37%.⁠⁸ What makes Ireland unusual is not the random selection, which is common, but the repeated link from assembly to referendum on questions that politicians found hard to handle.

What did not transfer automatically is that link. It depended on governments choosing, case by case, to hold a referendum, and on the wording they chose. For related cases, see Iceland’s crowdsourced constitution, where an elected council drafted a text that the parliament did not adopt, and Switzerland, where voters, not officials, can force a national vote.

Lessons for My Vote Forward

The following are interpretations and design proposals.

• A recommendation is only as strong as the path after it. Ireland’s results turned on whether officials put a recommendation to voters and in what words.⁠^4,8 My Vote Forward treats collective priorities as information for institutions, not mandates, and should say so every time.
• Track the distance between what was recommended and what was proposed. The 2024 referendums show why a published record should compare the wording a deliberative body endorsed with the wording an institution adopted. See proposals.
• Publish who chose the agenda. Courant’s list of political control points;⁠⁸ is a checklist for any process; see governance and the objection who chooses the ten.
• Selection must be auditable. The 2018 recruitment error was found because the secretariat checked⁠¹⁴ see audits and verification.
• Deliberation and open participation are different. Ireland’s assemblies were small and selected by lot. My Vote Forward’s demonstration is open participation, which raises different representativeness questions; see measurement and representation.

Unresolved questions

• How many of the 159 biodiversity recommendations and 36 drugs recommendations have been implemented? The official pages consulted describe the reports but not a tracked implementation record.⁠^12,13
• What did the Dublin assembly recommend on a directly elected mayor, and what did the government do? The official page consulted does not state the recommendation.⁠¹¹
• Would the 2024 referendums have passed with the assembly’s recommended wording? No source can answer a counterfactual, and none verified here tried.
• How aware were voters of the assemblies when they voted in 2015, 2018 and 2024? Survey evidence on this was not verified for this page.
• Will Ireland give assemblies a standing legal basis, with a duty to respond? As of the sources consulted, none is in operation.⁠¹