The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Constitution is meeting in Trinity College tomorrow (Tuesday February 2) . It will, I believe, be thefirst time an Oireachtas body has sat outside the Houses of the Oireachtas. They will take submissions written by members of the public over the last number of months firstly. After the meeting is completed a discussion moderated by John Bowman will begin.

The panel for the post-meeting debate will include Noel Dempsey, Minister for Transport, Professor Ken Benoit, head of the Department of Political Science, Senator Ivana Bacik, Trinity Fellow, Seán Ardagh, Chair of the Joint Oireachtas Committee, Jim O’Keeffe, Vice Chair of the Joint Oireachtas Committee, The Hon. Mr. Justice Frank Clarke.

More details on PoliticalReform.ie

Myself and Gavin will be in attendence, as will Suzy. We hope to run a live-chat on this website during the post-meeting debate. The topic will be electoral reform, unsurprisingly. For those unaccustomed with liveblogs/livechats; there will be a box on this site which you will be able to sign into and post messages, we’ll be reading those messages and comments and hoping to put a few of them to the panel. Participants will also be able to chat amongst themselves. It’s a way to add virtual participators to a physical meeting, and focus an online discussion on a single topic, I suppose.

The meeting starts at 7pm, it will go on for circa 80 minutes, the debate will then run for approximately 60 minutes. If you’re online you might consider participating. All welcome – though the discussion will be moderated and idiocy/vitriol will not be tolorated. If you’re willing to contribute, pop along around 8pm (though the chat will – hopefully – be running earlier, I’ll stick it up here around 6pm).

FYI:Trinity will be running the livestream and we’ll probably by relying on their Wifi system. So don’t blame us if this goes belly-up.