A victory for women and families in Ireland

Common sense defeated government obfuscation in a referendum to take the words 'mother' and 'woman' out of the Irish constitution

Some good news for a change!

Last week, the people of Ireland resoundingly rejected a proposal to change their constitution. The government, in two separate referenda, wanted to “update” the constitution, which was written in 1937, with new wording that would remove the words woman and mother from an article pertaining to family life, and to include “durable relationships” as on a par with married couples. The government asked that ‘family and care’ referenda, as it was known, be approved with a yes to each amendment.

Article 41.2 of the Irish constitution says that 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.”

The government proposed changing it to this: “the State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one other by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.”

The second question Ireland voted on was on Article 41.1 The existing text says that the State “recognises the family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.”

The referendum asked Irish citizens to insert a definition of family as being ‘founded on marriage or other durable relationships”, so it would have said that the state “recognises the family, whether founded on marriage or other durable relationships, as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society.”

Both changes were overwhelmingly defeated — the question regarding removing woman and mother by 73 percent, and the question to expand the definition of family to ‘durable relationships’ by 67 percent.  

This was a massive F U to the government, which had cooked up the referenda with seemingly no grassroots support — a stark contrast from the last two referenda Ireland held, which legalised gay marriage in 2015 and abortion in 2018 with huge popular support. 

The minister at front and centre of the Vote Yes Yes campaign, the Green Party’s Roderic O’Gorman, oversees the Department for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (yes, that’s a real government department). O’Gorman — is a reedy-voiced, thin-lipped and lightly-bearded gay man. He made a feeble advocate in country where the mother is a formidable societal force.

Unsurprisingly, Irish mammies made short work of him. Only one precinct in all of Ireland found him and his comrades in this neo-lib, bureaucratic, nightmare of a government even remotely convincing — and it was the progressive suburban town of Dún Laoghaire. Even they only voted in support of “changing the definition of the family”, as the BBC described it, by a small margin.

This was a tremendously heartening outcome. Demand from the Irish people to make these changes was non-existent. It was essentially a pet project of the NGO-heavy ruling class which gave mealy-mouthed rationales about making the constitution hip with the times.

Along with the ruling political parties, every opposition party also supported the changes to the constitution, with the exception of the small populist party Aontu — which of course is characterised as ‘far-right.’ Darling of the Irish left, Ivana Bacik of the Irish Labour Party, described the changes as “a step forward, progress compared to what’s in the constitution.” Mary McAleese — a former Irish president — supported the changes for the same amorphous reasons. She stated her support for the vote that would be “moving and nudging our country a bit further along the line, as our country just takes another step towards the egalitarian future that our citizens desire.” 

Inclusivity. Progress. A step forward. Phrases that were repeated over and over, but never fully explained —a step towards what? A future without mothers? 

It’s worth noting that she made these remarks at  and event for the National Women’s Council Ireland, a handsomely funded NGO that was founded in 1973 and claims to represent all the women of Ireland, yet has only a grand total 123 YouTube subscribers. By contrast, the very new group, the Natural Women’s Council, which focuses on “health sovereignty” and keeping trans ideology out of Irish schools schools, gets little to no media coverage yet has 1,260 YouTube subscribers.

It didn’t help the Vote Yes side that the establishment ran a disingenuous campaign insinuating that the constitution as it is currently written mandates women be chained to the kitchen sink. 

To have such a shallow grasp on reality, in a very small, well-educated, country that has elected TWO women as president, was an indictment on the Irish progressive elites. As shown in the referenda on gay marriage and abortion, liberal morality has reached almost every single one of the Irish outer parishes. They did not need a reinterpretation of the constitution to make unwed parents feel included or to liberate women from the kitchen. This is not the Ireland of old that was under the boot of priests. If anything, today’s Ireland is being coerced by a different class of men in frocks. Thanks in part to the overreach of this campaign, the Irish population is waking up to that fact, and it’s none too pleased.

Take for example the coverage from the New York Times, whose headline read “Ireland rejects Constitution changes, keeping ‘women in the home’ language.”

Note how the subtle placement of the quotation marks in “keeping ‘women in the home’” gives the distinct impression that the language of the constitution reads “keep women in the home.” Instead it honours the crucial role mothers play in contributing to social stability and well-being.

State broadcaster RTE played similar emotive games, with an “informational” video about the two proposed amendment that asked: “Can you imagine a time when Irish family meant a woman having to give up her job to stay at home and mind the children and other domestic chores while the husband or father went out to work?” Never mind that the constitution never said women had to give up work, and never mind that many contemporary Irish women would not mind at all staying home to “mind the children” if only they could afford it.

It seems that politics in Ireland is currently riven by two opposing forces: the old-fashioned back-scratching and “jovial corruption,” as I read it described on Twitter, of yore; and the far more sinister Tech-NGO-LGBTQ+ nexus that until now the old-timers from the Fianna Fáil farming communities outside of Dublin were happy enough to go along with because it greased everyone’s wheels. As this Gript article points out, those politicians still connected with their land and people are now “rethinking their life choices” and returning, chastened, to common sense. 

But a lot of ground has already been lost to woke ideology. Ireland passed a Gender Recognition Act in 2015, allowing men to declare themselves women. This, predictably, lead to a variety of crimes like violent sexual predators claiming a female identity and being housed in women’s prisons. While Ireland’s mainstream, tax-payer funded feminist groups like NWCI have wholly embraced the elevation of the trans ideology over the safety and dignity of women, upstart women’s groups like The Countess have been highly effective in mobilising public opinion against the trans erasure of woman as a unique category in law. It was the gender critical women of Ireland who can claim the most credit for the referenda’s defeat last week.

With its attempt to take the words mother and woman out of the constitution, this very pro-trans government overplayed its hand. In fact, perhaps unwittingly, it went against the “best practices” of trans activism as advised in a very illuminating paper published in 2019 by international law firm Denton’s, together with Thomson Reuters and an EU-aligned queer youth group. In its section on Ireland, the report highlighted the fact that the gender recognition act was passed by legislators at the same time as the country was experiencing a wave of popular support for legalising gay marriage — both changes were made law in the same year. 

According to the Denton’s report — which is a must-read if you are confused as to how the trans movement gained so much ground, seemingly out of nowhere —: “The most important lesson from the Irish experience is arguably that trans advocates can possibly be much more strategic by trying to pass legislation “under the radar” by latching trans rights legislation onto more popular legal reforms (e.g. marriage equality), rather taking more combative, public facing, approaches.” 

In other words, the general public, when fully informed of what transitioning really means, absolutely detests it. Trans activists are fully aware of this, and they explicitly call for hiding their true agenda from voters. 

The vote last week was not acknowledged by the government to be a trans issue, but who would have stood to gain most from obliterating the word ‘mother’, in particular from the Irish constitution? Men who want to LARP as mothers to indulge their fantasies, for starters. And messing with family identity, which is foundational to the trans movement it helps to gain more followers to its cult, is widely loathed by voters. When subjected to the harsh light of public scrutiny, these sinister moves invariably fail.