What a genuine citizens’ assembly needs, and why the unity proposal doesn’t have it…

“Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

Had it succeeded Sinn Féin’s defeated Planning for Constitutional Change Bill would have compelled the Taoiseach to publish a Green Paper on unity within 18 months, with a Citizens’ Assembly to follow within six months of its publication.

In Ireland the idea of a citizens’ assembly draws enormous prestige from the 2016–17 assembly that broke a profound social and political deadlock on the Eighth Amendment of 1983 (the constitutional provision that banned abortion in Ireland).

But it is worth being more precise regarding what a citizens’ assembly is than how it is broadly understood in Ireland, and what its most ambitious experiment, France’s Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat, shows about the conditions a genuine one needs.

What a bona fide assembly looks like

At its best a citizens’ assembly is more of a courtroom rather than a parliament. A randomly selected, representative group hears evidence, interrogates experts on all sides, and reaches considered conclusions of a genuinely open question.

The French climate convention is the strongest evidence we have that the model can work at national scale. Roughly 58% of its 149 proposals were implemented in full or in part and by the time it concluded public awareness reached as high as 78%.

These figures dwarf those of its closest comparator, Climate Assembly UK. Both assemblies were formalised responses to bottom-up public protest: the CCC followed the Yellow Vest movement, Climate Assembly UK followed Extinction Rebellion.

The French movement drew participants across a genuinely broad range of classes and political allegiances, which is precisely why both governments felt obliged to answer them with something more structured than a press release.

The CCC was Emmanuel Macron’s own initiative, announced by the President and tied to his executive authority. Climate Assembly UK, commissioned instead by cross-party select committees, lacked a similar figure to command national attention.

The French convention ran on a budget roughly ten times its British counterpart’s, funding bespoke digital platforms where citizens developed policy ideas, tested them against expert input, and organised public opinion behind them between sessions.

Climate Assembly UK had none of that infrastructure. The lesson isn’t that France was flawless, but that political authority plus resourcing lets an assembly generate bolder proposals and shift public awareness by real percentage points.

Why Irish Unity fails these conditions

A genuine assembly needs a question genuinely open to its participants; the Sinn Féin bill’s own purpose is planning for reunification, so the destination is written into its terms of reference before a single citizen is selected.

It needs origin and authority behind it; here the impetus comes from an opposition private member’s bill, not a government committed to acting on the output, which is closer to Climate Assembly UK’s weaker position than the CCC’s stronger one.

And it needs the participation of everyone the outcome touches. Unionists have every rational reason to decline to take part in a body whose founding statute presumes their community’s eventual departure from the United Kingdom.

This is something the French or UK assemblies never had to contend with because nobody was boycotting climate policy. An assembly missing an entire tradition cannot generate the legitimacy that’s the whole point of the exercise.

Why public conversations are still highly desirable

The instinct that a shared future conversation needs some form of structured citizen engagement, is sound.

The Shared Island Dialogue series has heard from over 3,000 citizens, and without a constitutional destination built into the invitation. The risk is that it stays too conditional, framed by department needs, around limited topics, and aimed at consensus.

A wider conversation would drop the frame altogether: not dialogues convened to produce agreement, but open-ended working groups gathering anecdotes and lived experience from people with no political affiliation, north and south, including those the existing conversation marginalises, sceptics, unionists, border communities living with partition rather than theorising it.

That kind of ground-up listening could something a set-piece assembly cannot: it creates space for a conversation many people want of a kind rarely comes from institutions seeking consensus. One making a new common sense visible, one story at a time.

Think of the story told by the Hungarian Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Gyorti of soldiers lost in Alpine snow, who saved themselves with a map that turned out to chart the Pyrenees. The story is usually illustrative of proof that any map beats none.

But Ireland knows better than to trust a rushed map: partition itself was one, and a hundred years on we still live with its mistakes. Another hurried sketch, an eighteen-month Green Paper and a half-attended assembly, would only repeat that history.

The alternative is a conversation built from the ground up, patient enough to include everyone each outcome touches and it’s how the island can finally draw an honest map, and over time find its way to somewhere better than where it started.