Same sex marriage vote thwarted by DUP veto

Mike Nesbitt got out of bed on the wrong side of history on Monday.

The Ulster Unionist leader had conceded in his speech at his party's annual conference two days earlier that equal marriage was coming to the North and that it would be futile to stand in its way. But he still wouldn't back the Sinn Féin/SDLP equal marriage motion, down for debate in the Assembly that afternoon.

The episode, and much else about the debate, showed that the structures put in place by the Belfast Agreement are unfit for useful purpose, that the main unionist parties are out of kilter with their “own” communities, and that unionist party leaders are uncertain which direction to take if they are ever to regain solid ground.

This was the fifth vote on gay marriage in this Assembly and the first to show a majority (53/52) for change. All the nationalists apart from the SDLP’s Alban Maginness voted in favour. All of Peter Robinson’s Democratic Unionists voted against, as did all the Ulster Unionists apart from Nesbitt himself, who abstained, and Stormont’s newest MLA, Andy Allen.

Nesbitt’s admission that events were leaving opponents of gay marriage behind will have been prompted by the results of a Ipsos MORI poll in June, showing that 68 per cent of adults in the North support equal marriage, compared with the 61 per cent yes vote in the Republic’s referendum.

On this measure, the North is more socially enlightened than the South. Support for same-sex marriage rises to 82 per cent among 16- to 34-year- olds in the North, stands at 75 per cent among 35- to 54-year- olds, and falls to 47 per cent among over-55s.

Apparent majority

People from a Catholic background are more likely to back gay marriage (75 per cent) than their Protestant counterparts (57 per cent.) The difference is not as significant as the fact that that there is now an apparent majority for gay marriage in every Northern community.

The poll also suggested that 49 per cent of UUP voters and 45 per cent of DUP voters support gay marriage.

The survey shows that 64 per cent of respondents in the North were very or fairly comfortable with a close family member marrying someone of the same sex.

Still, the SF/SDLP motion was bound to fail. The device of the “petition of concern” (PoC), inserted into the Belfast Agreement to prevent either unionists or nationalists riding roughshod over the other, operates to consolidate the communal basis of politics and discourage any breakout from the Orange-Green paradigm.

Any group of 30 MLAs can table a PoC, meaning a specified measure cannot be passed without a “weighted majority”: the support of 60 per cent of voting MLAs, including at least 40 per cent of voting MLAs from each designation. The DUP, with 38 seats, is the only party capable of delivering a PoC on its own. Sinn Féin, with 28, falls just short.

Thus, the DUP could stymie the proposal for gay marriage despite it majority support in the Assembly and among the people of each of the main communities.

The DUP will presumably have been thanked by the Catholic bishops for saving the faithful from gay perdition. The bishops had written to every MLA, saying that the “motion before the assembly . . . implies that the biological bond and natural ties between a child and its mother and father have no intrinsic value for the child or for society”.

Apart from Alban Maginness, who stayed away, no nationalist MLA paid a blind bit of attention. The only MLA who quoted the letter was Jim Allister, leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice.

One yes vote

Andy Allen was the only member of either the DUP or UUP to vote yes. A former Royal Irish Regiment soldier, Allen was 19 when he lost both his legs and suffered damage to his sight in a 2008 Taliban roadside bombing in Helmand. Last Monday marked his Assembly debut.

“I recall vividly whilst growing up the all-too-common passive acceptance of taunting and poking fun at gay and lesbian issues,” Allen told the Assembly.

“But now, as someone who is married and lives happily with my wife and two children, I would not feel comfortable – and it would not be right – with denying lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender people the opportunity to live happily with the person they love and whom they wish to marry if they choose.

“I believe in equality, and that love is love, whether between a man and a woman, or two men, or two women . . . That is the position in the rest of the [UK] and in the Republic of Ireland. It is about fairness and natural justice.”

Had Allen not been there, half the people from a Protestant background would have had no voice.

The shifting ground exposes the inappropriateness of the political arrangements.