If one was to ask Leo Varadkar what his greatest achievement in politics have been, what do we think he might say? I would hazard a guess, personally, that the marriage equality and abortion referenda would make it into any top five. The Government never tires of reminding people how brave it was to take those fights on, and about how the results were not a foregone conclusion, and how divisive topics require brave leadership, and so on.
I mention that because it is worth remembering that this Government does not shy away from big divisive fights on social issues when it believes it is likely to win them. If anything, the opposite is true: This Government actively relishes a good battle on a cultural issue wherein the Irish Establishment can do it’s favourite thing and set themselves up as the good guys against the Bishops and various other dark forces who wish to drag us back to 1991, or 1546.
I would go so far as to say that Irish politicians, and most Irish journalists, are never happier than when they are taking the moral high ground on some cultural or societal issue.
It is understood there are fears that questions could arise during the campaign about the definition of a family and gender issues, leaving ministers facing questions to which they do not have clear answers.
“We will have to be able to answer the question ‘What is a family?’” one politician said. It was not yet clear, he added, that the Government had an answer.
Senior sources, however, are wary that the referendum campaign could become a debate about gender, prompting questions about transgender issues that have proved highly contentious elsewhere.
“This is one of those things that you wade into at your peril,” one minister said.
Here we have the Government, according to Pat Leahy (to his credit, rarely wrong about such matters) running away from the “women in the home” referendum on the grounds that it might be “divisive”.
We should start, I think, with the startling revelation from senior Government sources that they do not have an answer to the question “what is a family?”. This is not surprising, because they also do not have an answer to the even more basic question of “what is a woman” – making it rather difficult for the Government to have a referendum on the role of women, or the role of families.
Yet this is not the significant thing: Nothing as basic as simple incoherence has ever stopped this Government pursuing a policy. If it was simply the case that the policy made no sense, well then this would just be a normal Tuesday in some Department or other. No – this is much worse than that. This is about the fear that they might lose.
Why does the Government not want to “prompt questions about transgender issues that have proven highly contentious elsewhere”? Because in every country where that debate is happening, the transgender side is in headlong retreat. And the Government, presumably having access to some basic opinion polling on the topic, knows full well that the same thing would happen here, probably dooming any referendum about women in the home.
All of this adds up to a pretty desperate summer for Irish progressives: The hate speech bill is as good as in the toilet, with the Minister who brought it forward scrambling to retain the support of her own colleagues and too distracted with the mess she’s made of crime to be much of a factor in the woke wars moving forward. Now the women in the home referendum, hailed by Ivana Bacik as badly needed, is on the backburner. The tide too, has turned a little bit on immigration.
On basically all the culture war issues of the moment, the progressive side, for the first time in my lifetime, is definitively on the back foot in Ireland. If you want proof of that, the Government running away from this referendum is as close as you’re going to get.
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