Some sixteen months after the electorate delivered a landslide NO vote to the Irish government’s plan to remove mothers from the Irish Constitution, a UN body is telling said government to use publicly-funded campaigns to inveigle the pesky voters to do the bidding of their international overlords.
In this instance, the overlords are most likely clipboard-bearing, officious types with doctorates in Gender Theory or Why Men Are Bastards Studies or something, but you get my drift: in the view of these self-appointed busy-bodies the expression of the democratic will of the Irish people is something to be overturned when the result doesn’t suit the dictates of an almighty UN Committee.
The Irish Times says that “the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) expressed disappointment with the failure of the referendum to pass and suggested the Government should not give up on the issue.”
From the CEDAW report itself, we learn that, as well as expressing regret at the disappointingly unenlightened Irish, CEDAW had helpfully included instructions for the Irish government in how to get the foolish voters to come to the light.
On Ireland, the Committee noted with regret that a proposed constitutional amendment to enshrine gender-neutral language about care within families was defeated in a referendum last year, and recommended that the State party, among other steps, undertake inclusive public consultations to find alternative wording, with a view to holding another referendum on the matter, so as to eliminate from the constitution stereotypical language on the role of women in the home.
Perhaps no-one informed CEDAW that they are, sadly, a little late to the party. The Irish government had already carried out the consultations and campaigns which were considered necessary to deliver a Yes vote, and had been confident of victory only to be left reeling, astounded, and maybe even a little humbled, when the people decisively told them to stick their proposal where the sun doesn’t shine.
In case anyone needs reminding, the referendum – which successive polling had assured the State and its army of NGOs would sail through – sought to remove the following from the Bunreacht na hÉireann:
“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.”.
For years, nay decades, we had been told this awful, practically “medieval”, language had to go, or run the risk of disgracing modern, liberal Ireland. Before the referendum, urging a Yes vote, then Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar said the voters finally had a chance to get rid of “very old-fashioned, very sexist language about women”.
It didn’t matter, of course, that – as my colleague Fatima Gunning pointed out today – the article in question is meant to prevent mothers from having to work outside the home out of economic necessity, and that many women want the role of mothers recognised.
Those with the biggest megaphones in Ireland – the political and media establishment – had decided it was reactionary and bad and sexist and made too much of women’s role of a mother instead of, say, an important UN Committee member, and therefore it had to go. Plus winning the referendums would be a paper exercise that the government could wave in the air as an example of all they were doing to progress women’s rights, though they were simultaneously increasingly unable to say what a woman actually is.
Turned out that the people actually have quite an attachment to mothers. And we like the idea of respecting and elevating them. The referendum wasn’t just rejected, it was the biggest NO vote in the history of the state. A massive 74% flattened the proposal – reaching the dizzying heights of almost 84% in Donegal.
As I wrote in March 2024, there were myriad reasons for the double NO vote (the referendum on broadening the definition of family was also massively rejected), including a backlash to immigration, and anger at the government – and the tendency of the establishment to confuse the fervour within their NGO bubble with actual public appetite for change.
They utterly missed the growing disquiet – and then the strong resistance – to erasing women from the Constitution. And they failed to spot the mood which led to a public rejection of the contempt shown for mothers,
It was rightly seen by mothers as a move urged on by the state’s embrace of nebulous but pernicious gender identity ideology, where women are “chest-feeders” and mothering is belittled and demeaned. The current government and most in Oppositon seem wholly captured by this nonsensical ideology.
Women were told that references to the importance of mothers were “sexist” and “outdated”, often by men who showed no apparent understanding of the power of a fundamental human connection as old as time – a force running deep in blood and bone, love and sacrifice.
In addition, for years before the referendum, national media platforms, including RTÉ misled voters by saying that the Constitution told Irish women that their place was in the home, thus laying the basis for the proposed removal of the offending article.
That claim was untrue – and various government ministers and NGOs were caught out and challenged in propagating a claim they should have known was untrue.
Responding to Ben Scallan of this platform, Supreme Court Judge and Chair of the Electoral Commission, Marie Baker, clarified the Constitution does not say “a woman’s place is in the home,” but merely that mothers provide an “important support” to society and shouldn’t “have to go out to work” due to “economic necessity.”
I’m not just re-hashing old arguments here: my point is that the Irish government has already done what this UN Committee wants it to do.
It has already held one of its favourite things in the world, a Citizens Assembly to make the recommendation the government was looking for; it has already endlessly lectured the people on the evils of sexist language and thinking; it has already funded a raft of NGOS to the hilt to campaign for its proposal, and it has already spent oodles of our taxes (because the government has no money, it just spends yours and mine) on a referendum where it was thought a YES vote was as sure and certain as the sun rising.
And that delivered the biggest NO vote in the history of the State.
So maybe, just maybe, dear CEDAW, that might mean the unthinkable could be happening and you, and not the Irish people, could be wrong. Maybe a Constitutional provision which recognises and protects motherhood is a perfectly reasonable and defensible article. And maybe you could leave the Irish people to decide these matters for ourselves.
Now, its likely that, at this point at any rate, the government would not be so incredibly foolish as to respond to the UN with an immediate plan to plough ahead with Ref2 on motherhood. The bloody nose delivered by a 74% NO vote is a blow that requires an extended recovery stay. But referendums (Nice 2 and Lisbon 2) have been rerun to please our international overlords in the past. And of course, Sinn Féin promised to rerun the referendums if they failed, though that was before the full extent of the crushing rejection was revealed.
So we would do well to remind the TDs that they rely on us to hold their seats and collect their salaries and we’d like our decisions and votes respected. The disappointment felt by a UN Committee doesn’t matter a damn in the real world.