Two weeks ago, Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman issued a stark warning to taxpayer-funded Irish NGOs that amounted to telling them that they would get the blame if the Government’s two referendums on women in the home and the definition of family in the constitution were to be defeated on polling day, March 8th.
It is almost certainly no coincidence then that the subsequent two weekends featured interventions from prominent NGOs that were featured heavily in the pages of the Irish Times.
First, Orla O’Connor of the taxpayer-funded National Women’s Council wrote a paean for a “yes” vote in the pages of the paper of record, declaring – entirely falsely – that the Irish constitution mandates the Irish Government to engage in the oppression of women, and that as such the reference to women’s role in the home must be deleted.
Second, yesterday, another taxpayer-funded organisation called “One Family” had its own call for a yes vote heavily featured, taking a softer, but nonetheless openly dishonest approach:
The upcoming referendums on the family will form “part of the reparation process” aimed at addressing the manner in which thousands of single mothers and their children were mistreated by the State and broader society for decades, the chief executive of One Family has said.
At the unveiling of its campaign for a Yes Yes vote on the family and care referendums on March 8th, Karen Kiernan, chief executive of the organisation for one-parent families and people sharing parenting or separating, stressed the need for a strong turnout and broad support for the measures.
She highlighted the suffering of women who “could not keep and raise their own children” and were “incarcerated” in mother and baby homes” where they were “sometimes forced into the adoption of their children, where they were shamed, mistreated and punished”.
Ms Kiernan said although there was now broad acceptance that their mistreatment was “very wrong” – noting commissions of investigation, redress schemes and a national remembrance centre – the vote on broadening the definition of the family in the referendum could be “part of this reparation process for what was done to the children and their parents”.
By now, I think, it should be abundantly clear what the “Yes” campaign in these two referenda – at least the “Yes” campaign mounted by state-funded NGOs – will amount to: It will be an open appeal not to vote on the constitution, but to vote against Ireland’s “dark past”. By voting yes, the thinking goes, you will be rejecting the vision of Archbishop McQuaid’s Ireland, and voting for a more progressive Ireland instead.
The appeal of such a campaign should not be under-estimated: The psychological attachment to the notion that Ireland before about 1995 was a dark and miserable place for all who lived here is deeply embedded in the consciousness of the electorate – most strongly, ironically enough, in those who were born after 1995 and never lived in the hateful country that they now reject with every fibre of their being. There are a great many voters who, while they may not feel particularly strongly about the content of the two referenda, will nevertheless feel a quasi-moral obligation to cast their vote against any manifestation of “catholic Ireland”.
These “soft yes” voters have tended to hold sway over Ireland in recent decades: In the two greatest manifestations of their power, the votes on marriage and abortion, polling and focus groups both showed that those who were ambivalent about the constitutional changes being proposed were nevertheless swayed by a sense of duty they had to correct the wrongs of the past. Their votes were not necessarily the expression of political conviction, but an expression of collective national guilt: We must do something to say sorry and underline how much we have changed as a country, and my vote can help do that.
The pattern of those two referendum campaigns tended to underline that approach: In both cases, the “No” campaigns tried unsuccessfully to make the debate about the potential future consequences of a “Yes” vote: In the marriage referendum, by making it about the right of children to a mother and a father. In the abortion referendum, by making it about (what we now know to be justified) fears that the abortion numbers would rapidly rise and the law would rapidly be expanded. By contrast, the “Yes” campaigns in both cases were openly emotional: You were not voting for marriage equality specifically, but for “love”. In the case of abortion, you were voting for a specific person: Savita, perhaps, or your daughter, or a woman at your work.
Those who oppose the present two referenda would do well to be aware of the tactics that are likely to be at play: In his compelling essay urging a “No” vote last week, Senator Michael McDowell raised substantive issues with the proposals being made – but he did not (nor might one have expected him to) address any kind of emotive case for change. On emotion, so far, the “No” campaign seems to be reliant on the primary emotion motivating people to its side being anger and discontent with the Government. This might be enough. It also might not be.
Nevertheless, this is the “Yes” campaign that we can very cleary expect: It will make the case that a “Yes” vote is about liberating women and families not from present tyrannies or oppressions, but from those of the past. It will, as progressives have done in almost every campaign over the last century, be an effort to guilt the public into voting against the alleged sins of their grandparents and great-grandparents. Don’t flatly assume it will not work.