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Claiming Our Future was ‘waked’ on 10th December in Tailors Hall in Dublin. There was a good attendance, some sadness, and, as ever, a bit of deliberation. It was felt the deceased had had a good life and that longevity was never the appropriate ambition for such a creation. It had a potential that was never fully realised but made a contribution that was worth celebrating, a contribution that should be built on in the future. Claiming Our Future emphasised the need for crosssectoral civil society action for change. Fragmentation between the different parts of civil society has increased as a result of austerity. There is a lack of networking and collaboration between sectors of civil society, more specifically the trade union, community, cultural, global-justice, environmental and cultural sectors. Each finds it difficult to move beyond its own agendas. Cross-sectoral initiatives led by Claiming Our Future included: online campaigns on the minimum wage, gender quotas in politics, and a wealth tax; the creation of an economic equality steering group involving organisations in each sector working on the annual Budget; and a campaign for the introduction of a Financial Transaction Tax. Developing cross-sectoral approaches was not easy. There remain challenges to provide leadership and to sustain commitment, to collaboration. Claiming Our Future brought values centre stage. It was founded in a crowded Industries Hall in the RDS in 2010 with equality, environmental sustainability, accountability, participation, and solidarity identified as its core values. At first values were seen as the link to draw together the different parts of civil society and to enable them to work together, more coherently and more powerfully, for social change. Then these values became the lens through which Claiming Our Future assessed issues and developed positions. Alignment with these values was the test of any key decision. However, it took time before the full importance of values became clear. Values are the motor of social change. They motivate people in the perspectives they hold and the choices they make. Change will come about by finding ways to convince a wider public to give priority to the values of Claiming Our Future. Lobbying the increasingly unresponsive powerful and hoping the mainstream media will carry our ideas are no longer effective enough, for change. We are up against powerful forces in a cultural battle as we seek to have these values prioritised. The individual, the consumer, the market, and wealth get prioritised as values. The advertising industry, the media, the education system and even political discourse provide the skills and the resources that sustain this. Civil society must gear up to compete so that a different set of values gets prioritised. Claiming Our Future promoted deliberation and the creation of public spaces for deliberation. Deliberation events were hosted on ‘an economy for society’, ‘income equality’, ‘political reform’, ‘international development goals’, ‘local resilience’, ‘new forms of energy production, distribution, and consumption’, and our ‘broken politics’. Deliberation was based on an open invitation to participate in developing a position and plan of action on these themes. Participants worked on tables of ten people to debate and build consensus on a position and how to advance that position. A form of consensus voting, developed by the de Borda Institute, was used to find the consensus across all the tables in the hall. This was a powerful means of exploring alternatives to current models of development. Civil society had been found wanting for convincing alternatives when the economic crisis first hit. A tradition of deliberation had to be rebuilt and needs sustaining and further development if alternatives are to be devised and put forward as the crisis changes and evolves. Claiming Our Future worked to bring the activist and the artist together. Dialogues between activists and artists were organised, creative expression was a centrepiece at all deliberation events, and a summer school on the ‘Art of Campaigning’ was organised. This recognised the central role for creativity in action for social change and in convincing people to prioritise different values. Art has the power to move people, to capture their imagination and attention, and to draw them into seeing new perspectives. It enables people to express themselves and to articulate different futures. Activists are challenged to learn to recognise and draw upon their creative talents. Artists are challenged to contribute their skills to issues they care about and to bring a new focus and meaning to their work. It remains to be seen where these different ideas that have been developed and tested by Claiming Our Future will be taken up. The ‘wake’ will, we hope, be the start of something new and ambitious for civil society as it strives, creatively and cross-sectorally, for change.   Niall Crowley was convenor of Claming Our Future

Organisations that support victims of domestic violence have been calling for many years for legal reforms to offer greater protection for victims. Victims of domestic violence who are not cohabiting, or do not have a child in common with an abusive partner, are not eligible to apply for court safety orders. Even where they are eligible for legal protection, they often endure long delays in court processes, and they suffer due to the serious lack of co-ordination between different Courts hearing separate applications relating to the same family. It is outrageous for example that issues of custody and access to children may be dealt with by a judge who is unaware of parallel domestic-violence proceedings. Given the right set of facts and a suitable litigant, I believe that there is now potential for legal action to be taken against the State for the failure to provide adequate protection against domestic violence for women and children. This is a case waiting to happen. Such a case could ensure greater awareness of the challenges faced by victims in negotiating legal processes and speedier introduction of the necessary legal reforms. Similar calls for reform of legislation on rape in the interests of victim protection are being made in the wake of the recent O’R case, where the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by a man who had been convicted of raping his mother. The court confirmed the current law that an “honest, though unreasonable, mistake that the woman was consenting is a defence to rape”. Rape crisis centres and others are calling for a statutory definition of ‘consent’ to be included in the current sex offences Bill. They have also argued that legislation on rape should be changed fundamentally, to require that a man should not have a defence to rape where he makes an unreasonable mistake about a woman’s consent. A core problem with the criminal law is that it is generally designed to deal with isolated events. It can be difficult to apply in the context of an ongoing abusive relationship. Garda statistics do not identify repeat callouts, so it is impossible to know how many recorded incidents involve the same individuals. Indeed we know that a great deal of domestic violence goes unreported. However, reporting levels have tended to rise where individual victims and survivors come forward to tell their stories and to highlight the need for action to be taken against abusers. Recent legal reforms such as the use of victim impact statements in sentencing were introduced largely because of brave individuals who spoke out about their experiences as victims and survivors, and the advocacy of others supporting them, like Women’s Aid. Their work has debunked many of the problematic myths about rape and domestic violence. We now have a better understanding of the terrible effects of such offences upon victims. We know that the majority of perpetrators are known to their victims. The sharing of experiences, and the taking of public interest litigation, are both valuable ways of achieving legal and social change. In a book that I edited with my TCD colleague Dr Mary Rogan, recently published as ‘Legal Cases that Changed Ireland’, we asked some individuals who have taken ground-breaking cases to speak about their experiences. These include Máirín de Burca, who won her case before the Supreme Court in 1975 establishing the right of women to serve on juries; and Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, who in 2014 won her Equality Tribunal claim that NUI Galway had discriminated on gender grounds by denying her academic promotion. Their individual stories, based in experiences 40 years apart, are both essentially tales of courage, of brave women whose actions have made our society more equal. The book shows, however, that the law is only one part of the solution when it comes to achieving progressive change. A range of strategies is necessary, including lobbying, advocacy and campaigning work, to bring about change in attitudes and culture. With domestic violence, a whole package of other measures is necessary, beyond legal reform, including better provision of shelters for victims and their children and of adequate resources for support groups across the country. Currently services are not universally available and, in some areas, victims of gender-based violence have no access to shelters or support groups. We need a fundamental change of emphasis, to challenge a culture in which gender-based violence may sometimes be tacitly tolerated. We need to work on changing attitudes among those engaged in perpetrating abuse, in order to prevent it in the first place, rather than constantly trying to mend the damage that abusers do. As the stories told in our book show, true legal and social change can only be achieved through a combination of legal activism, sharing of experiences, advocacy and campaigning work.