Bríd Smith on Citizens' Assembly: Workers' Rights and Housing

Thanks very much Dr Day and to your team for both coming here but also for the work that you have done and to all the citizens indeed who have worked hard on it. I think all of us would agree that the whole process of Citizens' Assembly has proved over the last few years to be very interesting and very productive and this would be my third committee now I think to sit on as a consequence of a Citizens' Assembly. The first one was the one on the Eighth Amendment, the climate change one and now this one and it is you learn so much going through it but also you learn so much about the process and how it just seems so much more democratic and thorough than the ordinary day-to-day stuff that we do here and it is interesting that a lot of people are watching what is going on but this particular one did get a lot of publicity and rightly so when they came out with their results. One of the things, just to take as an example, one of the things and you have it in your report to do with work and life and workers' rights as a gender issue, they recommend increasing the minimum wage to align it with the living wage, establishing a legal right to collective bargaining, increasing the resource of Workplace Relations Commission to make it more effective and a statutory right to reasonable access to flexible working. Was there at any stage any discussion about how that was important to them and why it was that successive governments have failed to achieve all of this? Because if it is an issue for the Citizens' Assembly to make these recommendations then surely it occurs to them what are the barriers to this happening and these are all issues that successive governments have failed to implement or in some cases have literally blocked bills on collective bargaining for example. Was there any discussion around that? And then the other issue I thought I might ask you about today was the question of housing as a gender-based violence issue because both of your statements make sure that there are sufficient funds available for shelters, for accommodations of victims and survivors and all the rest of it. But the impact of the housing crisis is merely massive on people with domestic violence issues. So I have a cousin who recently retired from Women's Aid and I was fascinated when she told me she didn't have to go, she loved her job. But what made her leave was the housing crisis because she constantly felt so frustrated that each time she went to court to support women she came out of it driving them back into the arms of their abusers. Not because of anything else other than the dearth of accommodation, of housing, of a permanent solution. And the Istanbul Convention does recommend that it isn't just about shelter spaces, but it's about a permanent solution to accommodation. So did they at any stage discuss the question of the gender-based nature and the violent gender-based nature of the housing crisis? Just those two questions. Thanks. Thank you very much. Well, on the first set of issues around the minimum wage, the living wage, I think the discussion on all of that came about as a result. As a result again of the COVID crisis and the realising how much we depend on the people who care for us. And then learning that they are on the whole not well paid, don't have the kind of conditions of employment that a lot of other people take for granted, etc. So again, a strong desire to, I suppose in a way, to put care more centrally in our society and then to take the consequences of that. And as you say yourself, Deputy, this is a very whole of government set of recommendations because the citizens were not bound by that department or that minister's portfolio. They were looking at how do we want our society to change? And they wanted people to have a decent wage so that they could live properly. They wanted families to have more better quality work-life balance, etc. So they were looking at it from the receiving end, if you like, of how they live their lives or how they and those who are closest to them have difficulties in interacting with what is and is not available. But what they wanted was to be able to pinpoint certain areas and that is why the recommendations are so focused. They did not want to write about the diagnosis. They wanted to give some prescription as to what could be changed and these were the points that seemed to them to be the most relevant. The issue of housing came up very acutely when we were discussing domestic gender and sexual-based violence. You have mentioned the Istanbul Convention yourself and you have seen that they want that to be fully respected and implemented. The issue of shelters and accommodation came up in that context. I think the issue of housing more generally came up a few times, but we already had such a huge agenda set out for us in the resolution establishing the Assembly that we felt we could not go into the wider issue of housing. You are right, of course, there is a very strongly gendered dimension to housing. But what they did want was to make sure that the Istanbul Convention is fully implemented, that there is sufficient shelters and accommodation across the country, not just in limited areas. Really, I would say that that is something very urgent to be delivered and in the scale of things is not a huge expenditure. It is a question of wanting to do it. For moreHerA Gold but you have to be! Ha! So... That's fishing. One of our business. You haven't even seen one of the current kilometers with history and other automotive individuals, thisukt happening in certain places. You... Goodbye. Good! Good! And a new idea of whether you as a citizen or a citizen,