Rosemary Bechler (RB): Graham – as a long-established expert on participatory forms of democracy, what do you think is behind this sudden interest in citizens assemblies? You wanted me to remind our readers that openDemocracy was talking to you about randomly-selected bodies and processes years before anyone else took notice! But when did the first signs of this much broader enthusiasm appear?
Graham Smith (GS): Yes, without doubt it is the flavour of the month at the moment. The first article I wrote on citizens’ juries was published twenty years ago and as I have been joking, for the first nineteen and a half of those years nobody was interested! The Irish Citizens Assembly was a game-changer, basically.
RB: When the Irish Citizens Assembly came up at a recent panel discussion openDemocracy organised for the Belfast Democracy Day, Roslyn Fuller, who is an expert in digital democracy, argued there had been far too much hype about the significance of this assembly process, that very few people after all could be involved in it, and that opinion on the abortion bill had been moving in the direction of the outcome anyway. How would you answer that?
