Shocker: NGOs will now support the Minister’s referendum

“The knives are out for Green Party Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman over his veiled warning to ‘progressive’ non-government organisation (NGOs) that they will have to explain themselves if they oppose the women in the home referendum,” wrote seasoned journalist John Drennan at the weekend.

O’Gorman was under fire, it seemed, with a senior Fine Gael figure telling Drennan: ‘It was an utterly stupid comment. We are going to have to build a civic coalition and cross-party support to secure this referendum”.

The Minister had said that organisations who “regard themselves as progressive would have to explain why they want to maintain the “status quo” if they campaign against a Yes vote in the referendum on removing the article from the Constitution”.

As I wrote on Gript last week, the vexed tone was palpable, as was the Minister’s annoyance at the thought that organisations who have had their coffers filled by public funding might now not live up to his expectations and support his proposal.

The errant NGOs would have to explain themselves – like bold schoolchildren – or get in line, fast.

Roderic O’Gorman has clarified for “progressive” NGOs who actually pays the piper, delivering an icy reminder that they will need to explain themselves if they oppose the government’s proposals.

A Non-Governmental Organisation is, as should be evidenced from the name, a body that is separate to and independent of the government, and, some would argue, which should assist in holding the government to account.

But many NGOs, as Michael McNamara observed, are now simply GONGOs – described in the Foreign Policy piece the Clare TD linked to as “government sponsored non-governmental organisations”, and yes, the contradiction is as risible as it sounds.

But the government politicians needn’t have worried. The NGOs heard O’Gorman’s message loud and clear. The least surprising headline of the week was duly delivered by the Business Post who declared: “NGOs row in to support government on referendums after initial misgivings”.

What a shocker. No-one saw that coming. As the Business Post also helpfully explained: “A failure to secure the support of NGOs would have made it difficult for the government to succeed in its own campaigns”.

All jesting aside, it’s a case of clear messaging, so we had Orla O’Connor of the National Women’s Council, in a remarkable piece of timing, out for a Yes vote in the Irish Times on Saturday.

It would be a “decisive signal to our nation’s daughters that a woman’s place is wherever she wants it to be”, she wrote, adding the usual demands for more of this and plenty of that and supports for everyone all around.

It sounds remarkably like the catchphrase used by the Minister back in December when trumpeting his “ground-breaking” referendum – “A woman’s place is wherever she wants to be, in the workplace, in education, or in the home”.

But that’s not plagiarism: its just the government and the non-government-body-funded-by-the-government all singing from the same hymn sheet as usual.

It’s worth pointing out that the funding enjoyed by the NGOs is not the Minister’s money, nor is it Leo Varadkar’s, or the Cabinet’s or the government’s. Its the taxpayers – you and me – who are forced to keep shelling out this ridiculous charade where we are being told what to think by people who neither represent us nor want to represent us.

Apparently, O’Gorman still needs to coax Labour and the Soc Dems across the line, but at this point, it looks like the usual referendum set-up in Ireland, with the entire establishment on one side and some few campaign groups on the other side, who’ll undoubtedly be called far-right and worse for going against the tide.

There is some prospect that there is enough anti-government sentiment to propel a No vote mostly based on the desire to give the establishment a bloody nose, and this Cabinet has certainly done more to annoy women who know the difference between the biological sexes is real, and referendum debates can take their own inexplicable turns.

Those debates, if they are to be worthy of the name, must examine issues which have been raised in respect of the proposed changes which may or may not have been foreseen by the Cabinet.

As reported by the Independent in December:

Another aspects to the changes to Article 41 might apparently be the effect on maintenance payments, which might come as a surprise to those arguing that the alterations would help women.

Barrister Geoffrey Shannon – the former  special rapporteur on Child Protection, and now a judge – said in 2017 that the removal of the clause from the constitution “could affect maintenance payments in family law cases”, the Times reported.

But Minister O’Gorman can rest assured that the “progressive” organisations have come to heel. If there’s inconvenient truths to be said that might damage a Yes vote we won’t be hearing them from those funded by the government – the ‘non-governmental’ groups that are very frequently so curiously aligned with government proposals.