Invited to replace a potent 1930s vision with a wishy-washy 2020s gesture, voters said no

To understand why the Government suffered such humiliating defeats in last week’s referendums, we have to look at both the close-up and the wide shot. The Government fell down very badly on details and processes. But perhaps more importantly, it misunderstood something very big about where Ireland is now.

The close-up picture is sharply focused. After a lot of trial and error, we know how to do referendums: a citizens’ convention, an all-party Oireachtas report, proper Dáil scrutiny and a clear indication to voters of what consequent legislation might look like. This is how you stress-test a proposed wording.

The Government, for reasons that remain rather baffling, gutted the first two stages of this process and deliberately evaded the other two. A company wouldn’t launch a new flavour of chewing gum without properly testing the market. The Government tried to market complex wordings with “trust us, you’ll like it”. This left it in that treacherous terrain where arrogance borders on stupidity.

If we zoom out from this debacle, however, we can see a much larger feature on the landscape: a Catholic Church-shaped hole in Ireland’s political imagination. Something big has disappeared but the Government (in this case quite literally) did not know what to put in its place.

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The constitutional clauses at issue in the referendums are not just stray bits of legal verbiage. They express a world view. They are pieces in a jigsaw that makes up a very comprehensible picture of what Ireland is supposed to be. I don’t admire that picture and it’s obvious that most Irish people don’t like it either. But if you start discarding pieces of the jigsaw, you have to have a whole new picture in mind.

The world view implicit in the 1937 Constitution is that of 1930s Catholic social teaching. Like all conservative religious ideologies, it has at its heart the desire to control women’s bodies and choices. Abstract and idealised notions of “woman” (not actual women) and “the Family” (not actual families) are pillars of the patriarchy.

We know how cold and dark that holy house was for those who were confined to its cellars or turned from its doors. We know how deep the duplicity went and how much cruelty was contained between the lines of the Constitution’s grandiose statements.

But those statements nonetheless made sense to most Irish people. This was joined-up thinking. The “woman” and “Family” clauses linked to other things in the Constitution (the ban on divorce, for example) and outside it (the ban on contraception and a plethora of misogynistic laws that enforced a second-class citizenship on women).

As the historian Emmet Larkin put it in 1976, “the Church had so integrated itself psychologically, functionally and historically into the Irish way of life that it became virtually at one with the nation’s identity”. And even beyond that fusion of religion and nationality, there was Catholicism itself, an allegiance that provided a profound connection to universal ideas, beliefs and practices.

Thus, the constitutional clauses that the Government was attempting to remove were not just statements about the functioning of the State. They were portals through which you could enter a deep history, a potent culture, a vast global community of feeling and belonging.

For perhaps as many as a third of the population, this world view is still broadly valid. But for a large majority, it has long since evaporated. The legal and social apparatus that made it work has been dismantled. The referendums on marriage equality in 2015 and on abortion in 2018 confirmed the reality that, as a governing ideology, it has passed away. And, for all the nostalgic dreams of conservatives, it is not coming back. It just doesn’t fit a society in which – to take just one telling indicator – over half of all women have third-level qualifications.

But what takes its place? Last week’s referendums were supposed to be a heart transplant, taking out the sentiments of the 1930s and putting in the values of 21st-century Ireland. Except the new words were themselves rather heartless. Especially in the care referendum (which I suspect was the deadweight that dragged the family referendum down with it) the values of dignity, solidarity and respect were conspicuous by their absence.

Thus, we were being invited to replace a potent 1930s vision with a wishy-washy 2020s gesture. WB Yeats wrote that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity”. The Catholic formulas that were inserted in the 1937 Constitution were bad – but they had passionate intensity. The proposals to supersede them lacked all conviction – and all coherence.

[ Frank McNally on WB Yeats's most famous poem ]

What has taken the place of Catholic doctrine as a governing ideology is a passionless managerialism. It’s that verbal atrocity: Ireland Inc. It is true, of course, that most of us want to live in a well-run country. But equally true that there is a lot more to the proper running of a country than keeping the economic show on the road. There is moral purpose.

You don’t have to fall for the reactionary fantasy that Catholic Ireland was a paradise to understand that, amid all its hypocrisies and meanness, it also gave people a vision of something larger than economic efficiency. Or to recognise that the rapid collapse of such a system of belief and meaning leaves a pretty large void in collective life.

I don’t think it’s really all that hard to figure out what can fill that vacated space. There are powerful republican values that most Irish people share: fairness, equality, mutual support, a sense of community, a hatred of injustice and intolerance, a desire to live sustainably with nature. There is a collective pride in Ireland when it lives up to these values and a shared shame when it doesn’t.

When so-called ordinary people are asked, through citizens’ conventions, to deal with complex constitutional and political questions, they always come back to those values and try to put them into words. The lesson of this fiasco is: listen to them.