Citizens for managing conflict Guest: Barry O'Mahoney

IE: Welcome back to another program of We Can Find A Way, a podcast about conflict resolution. My name is Idil Elveris. I'm one of the first mediators of Turkey, certified back in 2005 by the ADR Group in London. I have taught mediation and ADR for a long time, did some victim, offender, labor and community mediation cases. I'm now based mostly in London, and in this podcast I strive to cover conflict and its resolution through alternative means in all areas of life where there is conflict.

Before a summer break in August, this episode of We Can Find a Way will feature as guest Barry O’Mahoney. Barry will share his experience in facilitating the Citizens Assembly in Ireland which discussed same sex marriage as well as abortion which then ended up with a referendum in Ireland. The assemblies are a mechanism for deliberative democracy and Ireland is recognized as a world leader in this field. So Barry will share his experience with us. He had a career in corporate banking in both Ireland and the United States. He then moved to a payments industry body and later set his own consultancy business. He worked on general data protection compliance across a range of sectors in association with an Irish company called Roomex. He worked with the Irish government on managing the Facilitators and Notetakers, which were plenty on a number of Citizens Assemblies in Ireland. Let us now move to the interview that took place on 8 July 20.

Thanks for agreeing to talk to me for my podcast, We Can Find A Way.

BO: You're very welcome and I'm delighted to be with you.

IE: So the parliament established the Citizens Assembly in Ireland. Why did they do that?

BO: It was being driven by trying to gauge the mood for change in a number of key areas in our society. And it was felt that deliberative democracy might be a way to assist engaging the mood. The very first one touched on a sensitive topic, which was same sex marriage. What the Citizens Assembly achieved is, it gave the departmentarians, gave the government a sense of the mood, whether there was any interest in it first of all, and having a referendum and how might that go. And the one after that was about the abortion issue. So it was a good way of gauging the mood, seeing what people were thinking, gave the topic airtime. The Citizens assemblies, they are reported in the media every evening when they're on and it brings a focus to the topic. I think that was the driving force behind us. You could argue that possibly if David Cameron had a citizens assembly prior to a particular referendum, that maybe things might have turned out differently.

IE: So you're thinking this was by choice because they figured this is a tough subject and the more we know what the citizens think, or the more this issue is discussed, the responsibility will be less on the representatives of the people but is shared with everybody, I guess.

BO: Well, there's a cynical view and then being told by some parliamentarians that politicians were trying to get this off their table and let somebody else take the blame. There are a lot of people who are opposed to the idea of a certain assembly. They feel it undermines their parliamentary duties, which of course, it isn't but is another additional piece in the whole democracy process.

IE: You think it paid off?

BO: I think the evidence is very strong that it has paid off, that it worked. Even the results of the voting by the citizens in both the convention of the Constitution, which touched on the same sex marriage, and also on the abortion issue, the results were very strongly in favor of having a referendum. And the referendum results were very much in line with the thoughts of the two assemblies. It did work. It created an environment for sensible comment on the topic, and it raised a lot more education on the topics as well, I think.

IE: And you don't think it would happen on its own if there was no such deliberative democracy process?

BO: Because people wouldn't… it probably might have happened as soon as it did, or it might not have happened at all. I think certainly the deliberative democracy and the assembly process helps bring it along and also brings it along in a more informed environment on the topics that were discussed.

IE: You were involved, I guess, in this process?

BO: Yeah, my role was part of the management in Roomaxx, and my own role was lead facilitator. So I was responsible for training the facilitators and the note takers, as well as being a facilitator myself, being part of the management team that liaised with the Department.

IE: Can you please tell us about the process to participate in the assembly as well as in the sessions? How were the citizens chosen depending on their age, gender, education? Or like, a random sample, how did that work?

BO: The government engaged an external body that would normally do surveys. They were asked to recruit 100 citizens, or maybe 120 to a random selection. The source document for the names was the register of electors. The selection process involved a number of parameters. One was gender balance. There were certain guidelines around having a spread of age categories, and there was also an element of geographic spread across the country. Interviewers from that firm went and knocked on doors, and people were invited to participate in something, and if they agreed, they were then subsequently briefed on it. They were also screened to make sure that you didn't happen to knock on the door of somebody who was a very strong advocate for a particular topic that will be discussed. That screening applies to our team as well. Note takers anybody who may have any history of advocating for the topic couldn't be part of it, understandably enough. So the citizens were then pulled together and there were a series of meetings over several weekends that were unpaid. They gave up their time. Some of those topics was very difficult material for ordinary citizens to absorb and to take in. So it's great admiration for the citizens to part.

IE: What kind of time are we talking about?

BO: Because you said eight weeks, depending on the topic. But for example, when we were talking about the abortion issue, if my memory serves me right, that was possibly six weekends over an elapsed time of about a year.

IE: You're saying weekends, that is like Saturday and Sunday?

BO: Typically, the citizens will gather in the location hotel on a Friday evening and the sessions would run all day Saturday and for half a day on Sunday. And everybody went home on Sunday evening. They were there from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon.

IE: Were they tired afterwards?

BO: Some of the sessions were exhausting and they had an awful lot of reading to do because they got a lot of advanced material some of them were emotionally very difficult. As a facilitator, obviously some of the material that emerged during the discussions on the abortion issue… some people were quite distressed by some of the material they had to absorb and take on. So it was big commitment.

IE: How about you? Were you frustrated at times when you were facilitating?

BO: No, I don't think I have suffered any frustration. We try to gear up to be as professional as we possibly could, and we train our people and the note takers to keep the rules very clear, which is very important. And we stayed out of the subject matter. Although we're hearing all of this, we don't read the advanced material, just have a very high level briefing of what the topic is about, because we work with…the rules are very clear about keeping people off the topic, that they're not the experts on, that it is really important to be able to demonstrate an absence of bias. So no, I wasn't frustrated, but some of it was quite interesting. I know your topic is conflict and conflict resolution, but I suppose the idea in the facilitation is that you get conflicting views without the conflict. That was our role. The facilitator's role is to create that atmosphere where people can speak quite freely. It's not a debating society, and it's not a parliament either, where people have to take sides.

IE: So what are the benefits of getting the views without the conflict then?

BO: I think what it gives and again, that abortion topic actually is a useful example because it is such a difficult topic for people. The environment creates an opportunity for people who wouldn't normally be prepared to express an opinion or review, who are shy. It's not that they don't have opinions it's just that they're shy about speaking in a group. And I think the advantage of our structure, which was about seven or eight citizens at a table, is that they were a bit more comfortable to speak up. The important thing for us as facilitators is to make sure that they feel that comfort level. The other part of it is the usual thing. If you have a group of people, there would be probably one person who wants to dominate the discussion. Our role is to make sure that that doesn't happen. One part of the ground rules are if somebody expresses a view, they're not challenged about it. If somebody has an alternative view, they can say it, but there's no… other people at the table can't do an assessment of somebody's opinion that's not about it. One of our core principles and guiding rules for us was that disagreement is expected, but disrespect is not expected or tolerated.

IE: Would you recommend something like that for societies that are polarized and conflict ridden?

BO: I absolutely would. For very major issues, I think it's a very good way to go about it. It helps to gauge the mood. It provides informed discussion, so the views of everybody are captured, but they're expressing their views after they have received the best of information and the most objective of information. So there are experts who come in who are not aligned one way or the other who give the facts. The citizens get to hear all of that, whereas in the general public, people don't necessarily hear a lot of issues or they don't want to hear them. And that special groups are also given an opportunity to present. So for the abortion issue, the hundred people in that room were the best informed on the topic. They recommended that there should be a referendum. I think that helped as well to carry the referendum.

IE: So the conflict issue was discussed in such depth. There was an acceptance of referendum, even though that was not where it started. As I understood, it wasn't guaranteed that it was going to go to a referendum.

BO: If the citizens assembly has voted to not have a referendum, there would not have been a referendum. The final is not predetermined. That actually is something that anybody who is running citizens assemblies have to be careful about. And the department or the government Department, we're very careful on that. We're not looking at a predetermined outcome here. It's the duty of the assembly and the citizens in it to decide what direction they should take. If the citizens had voted against a referendum, there wouldn't have been one.

IE: You talked about some of the rules. Was there also a confidentiality rule for the citizens? Like, were they allowed to chat about those issues with family and friends, about what they read or about what they discussed?

BO: The restrictions was about disclosing the names or views of other people. But people want to talk about the topic and that's fine. And all of the material that was presented was all put on the website anyway, and that was all publicly available. And this was particularly so when it came to the sensitive topic of the abortion issue and of course, the same sex marriage. People's individual views were not identified. When as a facilitator, we were giving feedback from the table, for instance, or asking questions, it was done on an anonymous basis. So I would stand up and say, “the views from this table are” or “a citizen at this table has a question, and this is the question”. But it wouldn't be identified, there wouldn't be attribution. And in our file, it was very important that we didn't name who said what.

IE: A lot of care was shown not to turn this into an individual affair, given the history of this type of conflict or the subject being very conflictual in Ireland, I guess. Is that so?

BO: That's very true. It was not individualized. There was a collective. These were the citizens as a collective that were speaking. It wasn't John Murphy's view of the world and that was the dominant view. It was anonymized. It's also avoiding getting people into problems. It did help to create an atmosphere where people could speak openly and did speak openly. It was very important that everybody's views and opinions were captured, which is the job of our note takers. Our job as facilitators was to create that atmosphere and that level of comfort where people could talk about a very sensitive topic in a safe environment, so to speak.

IE: So right now we're talking about this abortion decision in the US. What would your advice to them be like? Would you tell them, why don't you have a citizen assembly established in the US? Why don't you try that?

BO: I know, and as I mentioned earlier, Brexit might have taken a different turn if there had been an assembly around that. I recommend the process for major issues. They should be just for the major issues because they're expensive to run and it's important that they retain their legitimacy. There's a lot involved in running a citizens assembly. We're available to do it in the US.

IE: So I guess you're saying the process creates its own legitimacy over time. Probably a lot of people have started with more distance, more questions, but they still participated and then during the process, over time, the legitimacy was even increased or maybe decreased. Can you tell us some quotes from the process?

BO: When this started, there were a lot of naysayers. There were a lot of people who are saying, this is just going to be a talking shop, it's not going to achieve anything. There was a lot of resistance early on from people and cynicism about the process. Well, they felt that it was the government who just washing their hands of an issue. And I think some parliamentarians felt that their role in democracy was being somehow eroded, which of course is not. Everything has to go back to parliament anyway. All the Citizens Assembly could do was to make a recommendation and that's how it has worked. I think there were some negative comments in the media and then there were protesters, particularly on the abortion issue. There were protesters, so citizens had to deal with that as well, so to speak, to run the contrast. But overall, the feedback and this has been consistent, the citizens going out after the process was over, ended up with very positive views about it. Even people who might not have agreed with the final outcome, they did accept that the final outcome was reached after a well informed group of people were able to express their opinions, that those opinions were taken on board. They were given an opportunity to vote one way or the other. And the whole voting in these assemblies can get very complicated. But the process is very transparent and I think it is a very legitimate process. It's not replacing anything else in democracy. I think it does add to the democratic process.

IE: Any new conflicts that you're addressing?

BO: Apart from going to the US? There is some talk in Ireland about the United Ireland. That's a very sensitive and divisive topic. I think before any steps are taken in relation to that, I think that is something that would certainly merit and benefit from the Citizens Assembly, in advance of something happening, rather than dealing with consequences afterwards.

IE: What I understand from this is you don't shy away from addressing conflictual issues that can raise eyebrows, even in UK or something.

BO: Certainly you shouldn't shy away from them. I think they should be addressed. It is only part of the process of addressing problems, but I think it's a very useful tool in addressing difficult scenarios. People have very genuinely both opposing views and it's about getting those discussed in an atmosphere where there isn't conflict.

IE: Are we scared of conflict then?

BO: I think most people would rather avoid it if they can. Then, of course there are always people who relish the conflict. So I think it's just part of our human makeup. I think better outcomes will result from diminishing the conflict or managing it, at least.

IE: Anything you would like to add?

BO: I think one of your questions was about “what would you recommend to people who might be thinking about doing this?” The governance is really important because the governance helps to establish the integrity of the process. By that I mean things like where our facilitators and note takers have no skin in the game. They are completely neutral as far as the topic is concerned. Whatever government or government department should be very, very careful about that. And I think the Department in Ireland, which runs the assemblies, has done an excellent job in creating that structure and giving legitimacy to the whole process.

IE: Well, Barry, thank you very much. My guest was Barry O’Mahoney. We discussed the deliberative democracy model called Citizens Assemblies, especially designed for talking about contentious issues in society. O’Mahoney explained the model developed in Ireland; how it worked; how citizens were selected to the assemblies on the basis of which criteria; the principles employed during the process and the outcome. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please follow like or share it. Within shortly, I will upload a picture of Barry in the Instagram account of We Can Find a Way. I will share some excerpts from the program in Instagram stories. Lastly, I would like to close by thanking musician Imre Hadi and artist Zeren Göktan who allowed me to use their music and picture in the podcast. Thank you. I'll see you in the next program in Septembe