Irish voters went to the polls last month to vote on a referendum on two proposed changes to their constitution. Both concerned Article 41, which deals with the family. Article 41 opens with a declaration of the importance of that institution very much in keeping with the Catholic spirit of the original 1937 document:
The state recognises the family as the natural primary unit group of society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.
The clauses that were put up for amendment concerned the definition of the family and the role of women. The first, Article 41.1, the so-called “family” clause, declares:
The state pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of marriage, on which the family is founded, and to protect it against attack.
The government wanted to change the definition of family by deleting the reference to the family being founded on marriage and replacing it with “whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships.” The other clause that it wanted to change, Article 41.2, is about the place of women in the home. The constitution currently declares:
[I]n particular, the state recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.
Furthermore:
The state shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.
This section was to be totally replaced by new wording that identifies the support in question as the “provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them.” The words “woman” and “mother” were to be deleted altogether.
Mothers in the home! Families founded on marriage! The common good! One can sense the progressive red mist rising as they encounter these reminders of the spirit of Catholic social teaching that infused Éamon de Valera’s founding document. What is this, the Middle Ages? Sure enough, these provisions were duly denounced as “sexist” and “very outdated” by the Irish coalition government of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party and by the main opposition parties, Sinn Fein and Labour, all of whom supported both amendments. Yet, despite being backed by all the main parties, voters went on to deliver the heaviest ever referendum defeat in Ireland’s history, resoundingly rejecting both proposals: 67% voted against the family amendment, and 74% against the care amendment. Just how badly the Irish establishment had misjudged the public mood was vividly exposed as the results came in and revealed a sea of red (representing the “no” vote) compared to a tiny dot of green for “yes” in part of the capital. As you can see, it was a case of bien pensant south Dublin versus the whole rest of the country.
A couple of things stand out about this result other than the magnitude of the elite/popular disconnect. The first is that the Irish seem to have reached the limits of their appetite for symbolic plebiscitary reform of the constitution and, with it, their national culture and identity. Given another chance to (as the Guardian put it) “shatter their history of social conservatism” and to further “underscore Ireland’s secular, liberal transformation,” they emphatically refused.
This likely marks the end of a period, starting after the financial crash and coinciding with a spate of allegations about abuse conducted in Church-run schools and the now notorious Magdalene laundries. By voting in high-profile referenda to permit gay marriage and abortion in 2015 and 2018, and then again to liberalize divorce law and decriminalize blasphemy in 2018 and 2019, the Irish people were distancing themselves from their conservative Catholic past. They stripped its ethos out of their founding document and replaced it with progressive equivalents more befitting a New Ireland devoted to diversity, equality and feminism. Rome was out, Brussels and Silicon Valley were in.
The defeat of this latest referendum will not reverse any of that, nor will it herald the return of the proudly traditional Ireland. It may, however, suggest that the Irish are waking up to a couple of things. One is the erosion of their national identity through unprecedented levels of mass immigration, a phenomenon which has now taken pole position in the list of voters’ concerns. It is likely this helped to deliver some of those No votes by undermining the symbolic appeal of yet another retreat from Ireland’s historic identity.
The other is the growing collusion of corporate neoliberalism and progressivism against the interests of everybody, except the professional managerial class. This was vividly illustrated in the Yes side’s framing of Article 41.2 as some sort of patriarchal relic requiring mothers to put “their duties in the home” above getting back to scanning cans at the supermarket. In reality, and as the campaign group “The Countess” has pointed out, that clause does not oblige women to stay in the home but instead protects them if they choose to do so. It has indeed been used in court to oppose the state’s attempts to require young mothers on jobseekers’ allowance to swiftly rejoin the labour market against their will. This preference is typical: polls conducted recently by the Iona Institute showed that 69% of Irish mothers would prefer staying at home with their children over working (if they could afford to). And contrary to the claims of the Yes campaign, this is not a gender neutral matter: 94.3% of those who do stay at home to look after their children in their early years are mothers.
It’s hardly surprising that the one constitutional article that protects a mother’s right to make this choice proved more popular among women than the view that it was another form of “oppression” from which they need to be “liberated.” Liberated, of course, in a manner than just so happened to dovetail with the coalition’s economic priorities. Indeed, it was in constituencies where people are poorest and where the proportion of single parents is highest that they voted mostly heavily against the proposals. Overall, voters in Ireland, as elsewhere in the West, seem to be tiring of a neoliberal/progressive alliance that prioritizes increased GDP and consumption over societal fundamentals like mothering. One, that is, which regards every recognition of the difference between men and women as a form of illicit discrimination.
The other noteworthy aspect of the Irish referendum is what it tells us about the Citizens’ Assemblies that kicked the whole process off. In theory, these involve randomly selected people, brought together to debate a specific issue and given evidence from experts, in order to issue policy recommendations that embolden the political establishment to make intrepid leaps in line with voters’ views. In practice, the result here shows that they are an anti-democratic “consensus laundering” device to create the illusion of popular support for whatever policy change the establishment favors. The mismatch in this particular case was staggeringly large: whereas voters rejected the family and care amendments by 67% and 74% on the day, the Citizens’ Assemblies had recommended them by margins of 98.9% and 94.4% respectively.
The excuse provided by supporters of the assemblies is that the government watered down the language they recommended in a way that fractured public support. I include the language of the assembly recommendations (in green) & the version the government put to the voters (in gray) immediately above; readers can draw their own conclusions as to whether the difference between these similar formulations is sufficient to explain a gap of almost 70 points between the preferences of the assembly members and the electorate!
More probable explanations readily suggest themselves. One is that the selected participants are not as representative as billed, which would hardly be surprising. The normal voter does not want to spend the weekend talking about arcane political questions with strangers. Anyone who does probably has strongly held (and rather atypical!) views about the matter in question. Another is the ease with which the process can be subtly manipulated by the committee chairs (drawn from the civil service) via their selection of which experts to call, often from the leftist NGO complex. More on that coming in a later article. It’s also likely that our preference falsification culture plays a role: people are decreasingly willing to tell the truth about their views in an age of militant wokeness, especially in front of a large audience about a sensitive topic like the duties of women in the household. For all these reasons, the Irish result is the strongest evidence yet that democracies would still do better to rely on the citizens assembled than the Citizens’ Assemblies.
Our societies have been subverted by technocrats. The easiest solution is democracy. It’s not quite as simple as that, I know, but it’s a good way to start the journey back to sanity.