DR CATHERINE DAY, the former Secretary General of the European Commission, will chair the upcoming citizens’ assembly on gender equality. 

The government agreed to establish the assembly in June and plans have begun to select the 99 citizens who will participate in the process. 

Day, who joined the European Commission in 1979, has been charged with overseeing and managing the citizens’ assembly, which is expected to meet for the first time later this year. 

She was the first woman to hold the post of Secretary General since the post was created in 1957 and will now take on the role Justice Mary Laffoy had in the Eighth Amendment assembly. 

The aim for this assembly is to bring forward proposals on gender equality across a range of areas, such as equality in salaries and in the workplace, as well as looking at proposals to examine the “importance of early years parental care”. 

The assembly will then report to the Oireachtas. Another assembly will take place after this one on the issue of local government with a different 99 people. 

The democratic experiment, which was praised for providing engaged debate ahead of the referendum on the Eight Amendment, is still relatively rare in other countries. 

In September, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said that a citizens’ assembly in the North to solve the political deadlock had “merit”.