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It is cheap and wrong to associate No voters with Ireland’s tiny number of fascists

The sneering backfired on the Yes side, and the Opposition disgraced themselves by supporting words with which they were unhappy

Peadar Toibin TD, Aontú party leader: the party took a principled position when it looked like both propositions would pass by a landslide. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill / The Irish Times
Peadar Toibin TD, Aontú party leader: the party took a principled position when it looked like both propositions would pass by a landslide. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill / The Irish Times
Breda O'Brien's picture
Breda O'Brien
Sun Mar 17 2024 - 07:00

Even Michael McDowell thought the referendums would only be defeated 60-40. Frankly, I was somewhat stunned by the landslides.

What happened? It is cheap, easy and wrong to try to associate campaigners and No voters with Ireland’s tiny number of far-right fascists. It is also deeply disrespectful to the Irish electorate who knew exactly what they were doing.

Perhaps the establishment, in the form of almost all political parties and activist NGOs heavily funded by public money, has just experienced something like what happened to the Catholic Church.

Dr Finola Kennedy said in her book, Cottage to Creche: Family Change in Ireland, that the Catholic Church held sway in Ireland as long as the economic interests of Irish people happened to be in accord with Catholic teaching. When those interests diverged, the Catholic Church rapidly lost power and influence. It is easy to mistake partial endorsement of a worldview for full-throated allegiance.

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Just because the electorate accepts part of your agenda does not mean that they will endorse the rest of it, particularly when the changes presented are flawed, ambiguous or patronising.

Michael McDowell had an ‘only Nixon can go to China’ moment. As a supporter of inserting both a right to abortion and gay marriage in the Constitution, he could tell truths in support of the married family

This is markedly true regarding the Irish Mammy. Taking the word “mother” out of the Constitution just in time for Mother’s Day played badly, and probably particularly badly in working-class areas, where the Mammy is the backbone of everything. Again, Kennedy perspicuously pointed out that there is more to motherhood than the “‘provision of care’. For a start, a mother carries a baby in her womb for nine months.”

Motherhood and indeed, fatherhood, cannot be flattened into a generic term such as “care”.

Many voters voted No for several reasons. Every carer I know has had to scramble for support, no matter how meagre. Take Yvonne, a lone parent whom I wrote about last October. Her beautiful daughter, Ayla, who turned five this month, is the only known living child with a dual diagnosis of Down syndrome and Trisomy 18.

Yvonne, who lost her first child, Noah, to Trisomy 18, has had to engage in epic battles with successive State agencies on behalf of Ayla. As I wrote then, why do we torture parents already under tremendous pressure in this way?

The idea that we would take “mother” and “woman” out, only to replace them with wishy-washy phrases such as “by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them” and “strive to support” was rightly interpreted as insulting to women, fathers, families, people with disabilities and carers as well.

As for “other durable relationships”, it was a morass. McDowell had an “only Nixon can go to China” moment. As a supporter of inserting both a right to abortion and gay marriage in the Constitution, he could tell truths in support of the married family that are dismissed when said by others. Not that he was immune from sneers, but the sneering backfired as badly as Micheál Martin’s personalised attack on No campaigner Maria Steen as a prophet of doom.

[ Five reasons the Yes side failed and the No campaign won the day ]

It is depressing that Aontú was the only political party mounting a vigorous opposition. The fact that some politicians were far from sold on the proposed wordings but obediently slunk into line in advance of the results shows how flawed “finger in the wind” politics really is. Aontú took a principled position when it looked as if both propositions would pass by a landslide. The other Opposition parties disgraced themselves by supporting words with which they were unhappy.

The symbiotic relationship between certain activist NGOs and the State is also overdue for rigorous examination.

The National Women’s Council (NWC), which claims to represent the women of Ireland, regularly ignores what women want. For example, it is demanding public childcare for all when a recent Amarach/Iona Institute poll showed that more than two-thirds of mothers (69 per cent) with children under the age of 18 would prefer to stay at home with their children rather than go out to work if they could afford it.

Was the NWC, which proved itself to be completely out of touch with the majority of women who voted, also in breach of the McKenna/McCrystal principles? These state that publicly funded information must be “fair, equal, impartial and neutral”.

NWC has said that it fundraised ‘to pay for staff costs, events and some printed materials’ for the referendums, but will it publish detailed campaign accounts of payments, including for staff time, video materials and website hosting?

The NWC is almost entirely publicly funded. In 2022, it received €945,266 from seven different Government departments and the HSE, and only €59,535 from donations and subscriptions.

Presumably, additional funding such as the €57,648 received in 2022 from the Centre for Reproductive Rights and a group called Novo Tides (US-based organisations) is already ring-fenced for projects.

NWC has said that it fundraised “to pay for staff costs, events and some printed materials” for the referendums, but will it publish detailed campaign accounts of payments, including for staff time, video materials and website hosting?

Orla O’Connor is currently a member of the Electoral Commission’s research group, which is supposed to represent stakeholders. The No side was not represented. How is that helping the commission’s independence and neutrality?

Let’s hope that the questions do not fade away, because the National Women’s Council, like the Catholic Church in the 1950s and 1960s, is too embedded in the establishment and too sacrosanct to be held accountable like the rest of society.