Convention on the Constitution to hold public meetings across the State

The Convention on the Constitution is to hold eight public meetings throughout Ireland later this month and in November.

It is intended that these will help to set the agenda as the Convention selects constitutional issues to look at in the final module of its work programme.

The next plenary meeting of the Convention is on November 2nd and 3rd next and will discuss the removal of the offence of blasphemy from the Constitution. Following that the convention will be free to make recommendations for further constitutional amendment, as it sees fit.

On Wednesday, October 23rd, the convention will meet at University College Cork while on October 30th it will meet at NUI Galway. The following week, on Wednesday November 7th, it will meet at Waterford City Hall, while on November 11th it was be at Dublin City University. A further meeting of the convention in Dublin will be at the Royal Irish Academy on November 13th.

Sligo meeting
On November 19th, it will meet at the Sligo Borough Council building and, the following day, November 20th, it will be at the Radisson Hotel in Athlone.

On November 25th it will meet at the Monaghan Educational Campus.

The chairman of the Convention on the Constitution Tom Arnold said yesterday he was "delighted to announce that we will be visiting a number of venues across Ireland to listen to the wide range of issues which citizens believe that the Convention on the Constitution should consider.

“Over the last year,” Mr Arnold added, “we have received many thousands of submissions and we are looking to forward to hearing the detail of these issues first-hand from members of the public.”

'Citizens' forum'
He said that the convention was a "citizens' forum" and it was essential that Irish citizens were able to make their views known and to have their say.

“Members of the convention are very keen to hear citizens’ views and I would like to strongly urge people living in these areas to come along to a local meeting and get involved in the process.”

The Convention on the Constitution was set up by the Oireachtas to consider and deliberate on eight matters on which it will make recommendations and report back to the Oireachtas.

Recommendations
The Government has undertaken to respond to those recommendations within four months and, where it agrees with a particular recommendation to amend the Constitution, to include a timeframe for a referendum.