Page 36 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

34 A Project of the UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF) Where has this worked? One story we think everyone in the world should look at comes from Ireland. It’s not one of our projects: but it presents the clearest real-world example of a government being able to take some tough decisions. We’ll explore this in more detail later, but in a traditional and quite religious country, a Right-aligned government has been able to explore reforms in the areas of equal marriage rights and of abortion laws. Centrally, what the Irish parliament did was open itself to a meaningful role for everyday citizens. Their first project involved blending 66 randomly selected citizens with a mix of 33 MPs as an exercise that built up mutual trust between the two groups. Subsequently, the government took advantage of a mechanism whereby they could refer a challenging issue to a randomly-selected group of 100 citizens and they referred them these hard issues. This group of randomly-selected citizens then heard from dozens of sources and discussed the issue among themselves for a number of months before finding some common ground. Their input into parliament helped leaders to lead. We don’t ask you to take a position on these laws, but instead, just to accept one idea: does putting that issue on the political agenda seem like a politically difficult and risky thing to do? If so, then this handbook will help you understand how they were able to do it.