According to Virgin Media’s Gavin Reilly, who broke the story yesterday, here follows the wording of the amendment to the constitution that the public will be asked to vote on next March 8th, International Women’s Day:
“The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision”.
The first thing to note here is that, in keeping with much of the Irish constitution, this wording is entirely at odds with the point of a constitution in the first place. The purpose of a constitution, generally speaking, is to place legal restrictions on the power of the Government. For example: the constitution enshrines the right to private property so that no Government, of any party, can simply pass a law that allows them to seize your house. It places limits on Dáil terms so that no Government can simply decide not to call an election, and remain in power indefinitely. That’s what a constitution is: The set of rules that the Government of the country must abide by. The constitution, generally, is the individual’s last line of defence against the state. That is what it is for, and it is why dictatorships or absolute monarchies generally don’t have constitutions.
You will note that this proposed constitutional amendment places no restriction of any kind on the Government. At best, it is a sort of vague generic statement of values. “The State… shall strive”, it says, “to support such provision”. In other words, try your best, lads.
Nor does this amendment confer any new rights. In this respect it is different, say, from the marriage referendum which conferred a right to marriage on two people of the same sex. Or from the children’s rights referendum, which ironically conferred more powers on the state than it did on children, but still conferred new rights.
The net legal effect of it, in other words, is nothing. Zero. It is a purely symbolic vote. David Higgins has a rundown of what the old and new constitutions will look like, here.
In fairness, it is also a symbolic vote to replace another entirely symbolic provision of the constitution. This is the wording that the Government proposes to delete to make way for the word salad quoted above:
In 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.
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.
You’ll note the same kind of phrasing in this original wording: The state shall “endeavour to ensure”, whatever that means. In practice, it means nothing: Once the state has tried, that’s enough. And who defines “trying”, anyway?
So, when it comes down to it, we’re being asked to vote on removing one entirely symbolic form of wording and replacing it with another entirely symbolic form of wording. The important thing to note is that in the process, we’ll be deleting the only mention of the word “woman” in the entire Irish constitution.
Whether you think, then, that this is a referendum to get worked up about will largely depend on whether that latter point matters to you. I think it should.
For one thing, this is not the first deletion of the word “woman” from official texts in Ireland in recent years: We have seen a co-ordinated and cross-government effort in recent years to “modernise” language. For example, removing references to women from maternity literature in order to replace it with terms like “birthing people”, in order to remind us all that, according to the unofficial state religion, “some men have babies”.
Since we’ve never had a vote on that, this vote might be a useful vehicle for members of the electorate who wish to express a view on the deletion of womanhood from official documents more generally.
For another thing, the entire proposal is just so painfully politically correct: We live in a society where it is universally recognised that women, including mothers, go out to work and do not confine themselves as a matter of best practice to their “work inside the home”. Our constitution does, indeed, hark back to the societal norms of the country in which it was originally drafted. We are being asked to change the document not because the wording in the constitution has any practical impact on womankind or family today, but because of a growing movement inside our society that desires the explicit rejection of the past as a form of collective therapy. It’s probably best understood as kind of progressive renewal of baptismal promises: We reject DeValera’s Ireland, and all it’s works, and all of its empty promises.
But what if we don’t? What if we’re mature enough as a society to say that yes, we live in a society where equality of the sexes is valued, but the differences between them are recognised and respected, and the historic role of each sex in our national story is not forgotten?
We are not here, after all, to discuss anything that has any practical impact. We are being asked instead to take the time out of our day to satisfy the need of this Government for endless symbolic change, of a kind which many people reject in other spheres of Irish life. In my view, the referendum should be rejected. Not because it matters – but because it is emblematic of the state’s obsession with things that don’t.