>> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. > Contemptible. If politicia

>> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere. > Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives. That is debatable. Too much concentration on divisive topics can distract from actual governance. We are now so deeply immersed in the social media world that we tend to consider "constantly raging culture war" to be the norm and the expected pivotal point of all politics, but it is more of a disease of the system. There is no hard principle that politics should be exclusively performed by elected politicians. Even in the US, plenty of states have ballot initiatives, thus outsourcing decisions about some problems to the citizens themselves. If the Irish system works similarly and reduces the systemic "inflammation", so to say, by outsourcing it to sortition-based bodies, then I would argue that it might be more efficient at governance than the "rip their throats out over scissor statements" standard that now rules the US and many other places in the world.