On January 9th, in the pages of the Irish Times, Orla O’Connor of the taxpayer-funded campaign group the National Women’s Council of Ireland told the readers of that newspaper that article 42.1 of the Irish constitution “gives the State the oppressive role of keeping women from careers or employment of our own”.
She was speaking of the present constitution, as it is today, and arguing that this “oppressive role” for the state should be removed in the referendum scheduled for March 8th. The only problem with her argument is that it is entirely untrue.
The said article reads as follows:
Nowhere in that text is the state obliged to do anything: Instead, it commits itself to the entirely meaningless phrase “endeavour to ensure” – in other words, to try – to make sure that Irish mothers do not need to work outside the home to keep their families in food and clothes if they do not want to. As various legal scholars have pointed out, this is one reason why mothers receive child benefit – an effort at ensuring that they do not have to work, if they do not want to.
Further, the state is certainly not obliged to “keep women from careers or employment of their own”. That claim is nonsensical, and unsupported by the text.
This week, the Irish Times went further – trying to salvage some kind of credible argument that the article is inherently oppressive, senior columnist Fintan O’Toole blamed it for the marriage bar that used to exist for Irish women, which meant that they had to cease working in any state job after they had been married:
This was the rule in the public service and State companies. It arose from something we now have to confront again: the belief, enshrined in the Constitution of 1937, that the proper and meaningful life for a married woman was in her home….
Since the referendums were announced, I keep hearing and reading that this language in article 41.2 was always just aspirational and never had any real-life consequences. It wasn’t and it did. It is true, of course, that the article did not require a ban on married women in the workplace. But it gave constitutional support to the ideology that made that ban socially acceptable.
The problem with this argument is that it is, inherently, historically illiterate: If the Irish constitution created the conditions for the marriage bar, then why did the United Kingdom also have a marriage bar, when it had and has no written constitution at all? Why did dozens of US states, which have no constitutional underpinning for such a bar? The idea that the marriage bar was – to quote O’Toole – a “real-life consequence” of article 41.2 is simply misinformation. After all: If the constitution required such a thing, and the constitution has not changed, then how could it ever have been abolished?
Nor is the avalanche of referendum misinformation limited to simply the pages of the Irish Times.
In recent weeks, the Minister for Equality, Roderic O’Gorman, told the Dáil definitively that “throuples” would not be classified as “durable relationships” should the other referendum – defining the family – be passed. Yesterday, he was explicitly contradicted by his cabinet colleague, the Minister for Finance:
Minister Paschal Donohoe confirms that the government can't guarantee the upcoming referendum to redefine the family won't result in polygamous relationships being legally-recognised in Ireland. Question by @Ben_Scallan. pic.twitter.com/8PEThwnGKG
— gript (@griptmedia) January 31, 2024
The fascinating thing about the referendum campaigns, to date, is that the overwhelming majority of the “misinformation” is coming from the side of those campaigning for a “yes” vote.
This may change, of course, as the campaigns heat up: Already, this writer has seen some tweets wrongly linking the referendums with other issues, such as Covid-19 lockdowns or the proposed pandemic treaty. For the moment, though, the main culprits are those advocating for change.
Yet what’s notable is that the Irish media is displaying a sudden ambivalence about, and tolerance for, misinformation. Twice in this month alone the Irish Times has published claims about the women in the home referendum that are objectively false. Nor has there been much eagerness to get to the bottom of the argument about polygamy and throuples in the family referendum. The sole “fact-check” published by TheJournal.ie concerns a claim about whether the referendum on women will delete the word “women” from the constitution – “false”, they say, because it only deletes “woman” and “mother”.
This claim, you might note, was made on social media. The Journal were surprisingly unwilling to fact-check the claims made in the pages of the Irish Times.
Or maybe that’s not surprising at all. After all, everybody knows that misinformation can only come from the hated “far right”, right?