Alongside listening projects, several other tools are now used by societies around the world to enhance the involvement of ordinary people in political and policy processes. Participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, deliberative polling and citizens’ assemblies are all variations on a core theme – the umbrella term “mini-publics” is often used to describe them. Today I look at the last of these variants by describing a project piloted in Ireland in 2011. My friend and former colleague David Farrell was a prime mover in it. Tomorrow I will examine the next step Ireland took, which was formation of a constitutional convention. Each offers pointers for Myanmar.

We the Citizens, the Irish programme, was an exercise in participatory democracy. Motivated by a sense that people needed new ways to engage in civic life, it sought to test one particular mechanism for delivering on that. The idea of a citizens’ assembly that was chosen had two key features: random selection of participants, and discussion by deliberation. The pilot ran for 12 months, and in December 2011 was summarized in a 100-page report entitled We the Citizens: Speak Up for Ireland. Much more digestible is a two-minute YouTube video.

To establish an agenda for the assembly that was at the heart of its experiment, We the Citizens launched an active website, convened seven regional events, and polled a cross-section of 1242 individuals located throughout Ireland. From among the 1242, it then randomly selected 100 people to participate in the assembly. Issues for debate were generated by the regional events and the national poll.

Discussion at the actual two-day citizens’ assembly held in Dublin in June 2011 was facilitated by experts speaking on both sides of contentious issues. The aim was to place as much objective information on the table as possible. The 100 participants then engaged in deliberation and made informed decisions, often refining their own views during the process. Their final recommendations took the form either of policy proposals for government, or of wordings for national referendums.

The context for this Irish initiative was an established democracy. In Myanmar, democracy is still at a very formative stage, and is required by its military overseers to be discipline-flourishing. However, nothing in either of these specific local conditions conflicts with the underlying principles of a citizens’ assembly. Indeed, many different strands of Myanmar opinion could well agree that this kind of exercise in participatory democracy is a broadly acceptable way to extend the frontiers of political engagement inside the country.