Still more sparks flew this week over the issue of the constitutional convention the government aims to hold when the President called for a referendum on its conclusions to be put to the people.

These sparks are flying even before the convention’s terms of reference have been set.  As such, one should probably expect a full-blown inferno once the convention itself kicks off.  Even more sparks can be expected at crunch time when Parliament is called to vote on the convention’s conclusions and also if and when a referendum on the issue is eventually held.

The President is absolutely right when he says that the question of approving the convention’s results should be put to the people by way of a referendum. He is also absolutely right when he says that the country needs to seek unity on the issue before going into such a delicate and potential upheaval of the core principles that the country and its laws are subject to. 

Bickering between the country’s two main political parties over the government’s choice of the person who is to chair the convention, however, threatens to scuttle the whole project before it even fully gets off the ground. There are, in fact, hints that the Opposition could boycott the convention, which would be a great pity and represent a huge opportunity lost over a comparatively small issue when considering the enormity of the undertaking being proposed.

The Constitutional Convention and the subsequent reform of the Constitution, however, is not about politicians, one-upmanship or the choice of chairman, far from it. What it is all about at the beginning and the end of the day is the people. For example, late last year Ireland had assembled its own Constitutional Convention, which was comprised of 99 people: 33 politicians and 66 ordinary citizens who were selected at random and who reflected the age, regional, and gender balance of the Irish electorate. Its chairman was appointed by the government.

As such, the President was also correct when he remarked that the process of constitutional reform needs to include the widest participation of society as possible, as has been the case in other European countries, such as Ireland, that have gone down the same road.

But the main question here is whether any such referendum should be held before or after Parliament votes on the conclusions.

On the one hand, one could argue that a referendum before a vote in Parliament would bind Members of Parliament to respect the people’s wishes, as was largely seen to have been the case with the country’s last referendum on the divorce issue. On divorce, in many cases it was perhaps less a matter of MPs having been bound by the referendum’s results and more a matter of MPs having been effectively freed of party ties by the referendum’s result and able to vote in favour of divorce as per their own personal convictions.

On the other hand, a vote in Parliament could very well scuttle the whole project before it is even put to the people since many, but not all, of the issues expected to be put on the agenda would require a two-thirds approval by Parliament.

The right course of action, it could be argued, would be for the convention to be held, with the widest participation of civil society as possible, for Parliament to thoroughly debate its conclusions and to draw up the question(s) for the electorate, after which a referendum would be held on the question(s). Parliament should first agree on the amendments and then bring the question of those amendments to the people.

One novel suggestion is that, since some of if not most of the issues to be considered would require a two-thirds vote in favour in Parliament, that this hypothetical and albeit non-binding referendum also carries a two-thirds threshold for approval.

Although we are still some way off from the convention getting off the ground, the political parties should be able to find some common ground to start from, and the antagonism being displayed to date will not do any favours to this delicate process of reforming the Constitution, a matter that all political parties, after all, agree upon.

At the end of the day, it is the people who need to approve the constitutional changes proposed by the politicians because those changes are not the gambits of political games, they are about the national interest and national pride, and not about which political party ushered in these changes and who stood for or against them. Nor is the convention – and the changes to the national fabric being proposed – about the person who chairs it, it is about so much more than that.