Readers may remember the great fanfare that accompanied the Government’s announcement, this past International Women’s Day, of a referendum on “gender equality”. According to that announcement, the Irish people should currently be enduring their final few months of life under the jackboot of article 41.2 of the Irish constitution, which condemns Irish womankind to a life of slavery in the home. It reads as follows:
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.
As I wrote here at the time of that announcement, it is a referendum without much meaning: The second clause above, like much of the rest of DeValera’s constitution, was a promise that was never intended to be kept. If you read the wording, it is purely aspirational: The state shall “endeavour” to ensure that women never need to earn an income outside the home, it says. To which every policymaker ever since has replied with a shrug of the shoulders and “oh well, we tried, what else can we do?”
“Endeavouring” to do something is not a promise to do it – as every lad who has endeavoured to lose five stone this year can attest.
Nonetheless, the referendum should be an easy lay-up for the Government, because it is almost guaranteed universal support from all those who matter in Irish society. The media will support it, with the qualification that perhaps it is a useless bit of symbolism, but even at that, symbolism matters. The politicians will support it mainly on the grounds that there is little to be gained from opposing it. And the voters would probably support it on the grounds that it’s the kind of thing you can feel progressive voting for, without having to pay any price for in return.
And yet, complains Ivana Bacik, the referendum appears to have been quietly shelved. Or at least, she moans, quietly delayed:
Government Ministers now appear to have done a U-turn. Last week, I submitted a parliamentary question to find out if the gender equality referendum will be held in November, and when the wording of the referendum will be published. I was very disappointed by the answer, which did not answer my question at all.
“In the Dáil today, I asked the Tánaiste to make a statement on the referendum. Alas, he too evaded my question, despite the Taoiseach’s previous commitment.
“This referendum has been deferred several times before, but there is no excuse now – the Gender Equality Committee has done the Government’s work for it, in drafting the text of the questions to be put to the people – text which was unanimously agreed by the Committee.
“Ireland has been criticised over many years at an international level for the delay on deleting the sexist language from our Constitution. So, what is the delay?”
In order to get an answer to Deputy Bacik’s question, yours truly reached out to three Oireachtas sources, on background. Sadly, only one replied.
“Nobody cares about that referendum”, my interlocutor tells me. “And there’s an increasing sense in Government since the hate speech fiasco that the last thing the public wants to see or hear now is another bit of woke messaging that doesn’t fix any real problems in people’s lives. So it’s just not a priority”.
Take that for what it is – one person’s opinion, nothing more. And yet, back in March when this was first mooted, a Fine Gael TD told me that he thought there was a chance the referendum would actually be defeated, citing the example of a previous referendum held to lower the age of eligibility to run for President. “The public didn’t take that one seriously”, he said (or words to that effect) because they didn’t see how or why it mattered, and it was a free vote against the Government. “I don’t think they’ll take this one seriously either”.
For what it’s worth, that struck me at the time as sensible – and yet another reason why this Government would be much better off if it listened more regularly to many of its older, and more in-tune, backbenchers. Perhaps on this occasion it has.
Because the truth of the matter is that Gript is likely the only publication covering Bacik’s complaint about the shelving of the referendum today for a reason – if this was an issue that really mattered to progressives, let alone the public, the Irish Times and the Independent and others would be pushing hard for answers about the reasons for delay. They aren’t.
The Government would be wise to shelve this permanently – there simply doesn’t exist an appetite for this kind of constitutional tinkering in the public at large. And doing it anyway would tend simply to reinforce to the public that the Government lives on an entirely different planet, when it comes to deciding what’s important, and what is not.