Metropolitan bubble: Referendum fallout for Irish politics and wider society

“The people have spoken, the bastards.” California politician Dick Tuck’s pithy response to the verdict of the electorate on his 1966 run for the US Senate may have hovered on the lips of Government politicians in private last weekend. But following the record-breaking rejection by voters of the 39th and 40th amendments to the Constitution, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and his colleagues were quick to come out with hands up and faces firmly set to expressions of respect and acceptance.

We know we got it wrong, they said in sombre tones. Let us never speak of this again.

Not so fast. March 8th was the first time in four years and one month that the nation had the opportunity to cast a vote. There hasn’t been that long a gap since the mid-1970s. Hello, Irish electorate, we’ve missed you. During those four years, there has been a global pandemic, wars in Europe and the Middle East, an unprecedented influx of refugees, the return of inflation for the first time in generations and an apparently endless housing crisis. Hundreds of thousands of under-23s, most of whom get their information via platforms that barely existed 10 years ago, had the opportunity to cast their vote for the first time. So, welcome, Generation Z. How are things going for you, Generation Rent?

Jane Suiter, director of the Institute for Future Media, Democracy and Society at DCU says: “The Irish electorate has been very volatile over the last decade. 2008 upended politics all around the world, including in Ireland, and we’ve had extreme volatility since, and a kind of anti-politics feeling. Young people have it even more than older people. Every year, more younger people are coming on to the electoral register and older people are falling off. So we’re getting more volatility. And then in the last year, we have had the whole anti-immigrant thing rising up across age groups, and across classes.”

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Now that ballot boxes have been put away until the local and European elections on June 8th (along with what promises to be the dullest referendum in constitutional history, on European patent law), did any of those column inches and carefully stopwatched broadcast minutes really matter?

UCC political scientist Theresa Reidy says no. “We already knew that there is considerable volatility in the electorate,” she says. “We’ve known that since 2011. So I don’t think this referendum tells us anything extra or new that we didn’t already know.”

It’s true that within the political establishment there was no huge surprise at the result, which many saw coming in the final days of the campaign. But there was real shock at the scale of the defeats, particularly of the care amendment, which, at almost three to one against, broke all previous records. It called into question the political antennae of a Government in countdown mode for a year of elections.

Reidy points out that the previous record for a defeat was held by another proposal that emerged from a Citizens’ Assembly, to reduce the age requirement for presidential candidates from 35 to 21. That amendment was torpedoed, on the day that marriage equality sailed through.

The amendments were ultimately defeated by a patchwork coalition of wildly disparate parts that are unlikely ever to come together again

“Irish people like their referendums,” says Reidy, who advises nevertheless against extrapolating from last weekend’s results into the political party arena. “It happens all the time with these kinds of referendums,” she says. “There isn’t going to be any serious fallout from it.” She defines serious as “the Government falls or a Minister resigns or the Government changes its policy programme in some major area”.

Still, it is hard not to see the result as a kick in the pants for Ireland’s metropolitan bubble, the institutional “blob”, composed of the main political parties along with the larger, mostly State-funded NGOs which are often described not entirely accurately as “civil society”. It also raises questions about the system of Citizens’ Assemblies and cross-party political consensus which has previously delivered progressive reforms on issues such as abortion and marriage equality.

This time, while the stakes may have been high for the small number of committed advocates on both sides, for most people, including the many politicians who showed so little appetite for campaigning, it was a decision with few meaningful consequences. Those who argued that the questions being put to the people were more about “vibes” than substantive change will feel vindicated.

Arrayed against the “blob” were some Independent politicians, along with the two smallest parties in the Oireachtas [Peadar Tóibín’s Aontú and Independent Ireland which has three TDs, Michael Fitzmaurice, Michael Collins and Richard O’Donoghue], and a minority of the country’s campaigning organisations. They were blessed with an inept, tin-eared and arrogant Yes campaign which will serve as a useful handbook for future governments on how not to do it.

Suiter isn’t convinced by the “blob” argument. “Civil society was actually divided about this. And even those who are advocating for a Yes, were pretty half-hearted about it because it didn’t go as far as they wanted. That led to the whole thing about, oh, it’s just a start, vote Yes and trust us and we’ll do more. So I think that led to the lack of cohesion all of those different people.”

But the result remains hard to read. The amendments were ultimately defeated by a patchwork coalition of wildly disparate parts that are unlikely ever to come together again. Gender-critical feminists stood alongside anti-abortion activists. Rural social conservatives voted the same way as urban Trotskyists.

The result is a sort of political Rorschach test on to which anyone can project their own meaning. For some, the care amendment fell because it was insufficiently progressive. For others the opposite is true. Many voters were clearly persuaded by the argument that the wording of the text was dangerously ambiguous.

One example of voter volatility was the late surge for the Yes/No option, advocating support for the family amendment but opposition to the care wording because it fell short of what was recommended by the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality and the subsequent Oireachtas committee. Yes/No went from the margins two weeks out from the vote to becoming an article of faith among left-leaning and younger urban voters. It was what drove the six-point gap between the two results and was the reason the care referendum saw the biggest No vote in Irish constitutional history.

When the Social Democrats recorded a video of their latest recruit, academic and housing rights activist Rory Hearne, supporting the party’s official Yes/Yes position, it probably seemed unremarkable. By the time the video was posted in the final week of the campaign, Hearne was being furiously criticised as a sell-out on left-wing social media.

Such skirmishes could be a harbinger of things to come at the upcoming elections, when the smaller left parties will be fighting over the same turf as the expanding Sinn Féin party. And the schism in the progressive coalition that previously delivered abortion and marriage equality was a significant factor in the outcome. But as the two-to-one defeat of the family amendment shows, it was not the decisive one.

It would be a gross oversimplification to see the result as a backlash against Ireland’s recent liberalisation. For much of the international media, though, the story was simple. The New York Times noted that the vote was taking place on International Women’s Day, reflecting “the country’s more secular and liberal modern identity”. It subsequently ran with the headline “Ireland rejects changes to Constitution in defeat for equality advocates”.

The Guardian reported that “Varadkar admits defeat over bid to modernise Ireland’s Constitution”. While noting the No vote was not solely based on a “conservative backlash”, it said the result was “a contrast to the seismic 2015 same-sex marriage referendum and 2018 abortion referendum that underscored Ireland’s secular, liberal transformation”.

Others were more forthright. “A new referendum has exposed the woke cause,” proclaimed columnist Tim Stanley in Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

If the referendums are remembered for one thing, it may be the arrival of the word “woke” in mainstream Irish politics. Since 2020 it has become the preferred pejorative term for modern progressive politics rooted more in concerns about identity and privilege than in critiques of economic inequality. “Wokeness” has entered the lexicon of right-wing politicians from Florida governor Ron DeSantis to former British home secretary Suella Braverman, although it is also criticised from the left for its alleged illiberalism and over-obsession with gender and race.

Speaking in Dublin Castle after the result was clear, Michael McDowell, the No side’s most prominent campaigner and most potent weapon, described the rejected amendments as “pure wokeism... demeaning window dressing”. Meanwhile, in the courtyard outside, far-right demonstrators unfurled a banner declaring “Woke is dead”.

“The one thing I won’t do is try to define woke for you,” says Reidy. “But, this is a strand, a virulent strand of politics in the United States. It’s pretty strong and pretty unpleasant as well in British politics. And so to some extent I’m not sure woke would survive contact with a general election, once we get to the point where we’re discussing the state of the economy, inflation, health, housing.

“I suspect immigration will be a much more troublesome issue at the general election, but I don’t think that kind of culture war will. The one thing that we’ve had in Ireland for decades is referendums to deal with these culture war issues.”

The local elections is the place where we’ll be able to see whether that additional mobilisation that’s come out now since Covid is actually going to manifest in electoral terms

The fiercest battles in the current culture wars are over gender and trans issues. Anyone who felt one of the problems with last week’s vote was the complexity of holding two referendums should remember the original proposal was for three. The Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality also recommended an amendment adding the words “regardless of sex” to the constitutional guarantee of equality for all citizens. The Government rejected this, on the grounds that equality was already guaranteed, but the decision had the added benefit of removing the red-button words “sex” and “gender” from the debate.

Underlying some of this, it seems, is a peculiar feature of Irish politics. We know that many people hold views on certain issues that are not represented by any of the mainstream political parties. “I think that is a very fair point,” says Reidy. “Research shows there is a significant minority of voters who hold conservative views.”

Since last Sunday’s Portuguese election, in which the far-right Chega party had an electoral breakthrough, Ireland is even more of an outlier among European countries in not having a significant far-right presence. Does last week’s anti-establishment revolt contain the seeds of a change?

As to whether the referendums represent some sort of end point for Ireland’s progressive shift, Reidy says that when it comes to deep-seated social questions, change tends to come slowly. “The kind of destination we’re at today, that is the product of 40 years of slow social change. It’s not just the marriage equality and abortion referendums, there were lots of other referendums.

“So we should be careful as well about over-analysing what these two votes mean in terms of the liberal agenda. It is most unlikely that the disposition of the electorate has changed in four years. The spectacularly bad campaign run by the Government has to get its place in this as well. A lot of voters broadly favoured the direction of travel, but were very unhappy with the wording. Part of the difficulty that we find ourselves in now is the kind of coalition that succeeded in defeating these referendums, there are so many strands to it and everybody can claim it was their strand that won.”

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