Readers of this journal will be well aware of all that has been happening in Ireland over the last few years. Without really thinking of the consequences, we have been rushing pell-mell into the same set of social norms as most of the rest of the Western world. In fact, to some extent we have accelerated past some of our neighbors, so anxious are we to become “modern” and “progressive.”

For example, in 2015, we became the first country anywhere to enshrine in our Constitution a right for same-sex couples to marry. This was done by referendum, and the majority in favor was 62 percent to 38 percent.

Then, in 2018, we became the first country to remove from the Constitution the right to life of the unborn. That was also carried out by referendum, and this time the vote in favor was two-to-one, even bigger than in the same-sex marriage referendum. Of course, we could only remove the right to life of the unborn from the Constitution because we were one of the very few countries to have established the right to life in its Constitution in the first place. We put it there in 1983, and (ironically, in view of the 2018 vote) by a two-to-one margin. The pro-life movement had pushed for this move to prevent our Supreme Court from arriving at a Roe v. Wade-type decision.

The pressure is now on to liberalize our abortion law even more and also to allow euthanasia and assisted suicide. At present, our abortion law (in place since January 2019) permits abortion for any reason up to 12 weeks; after that, abortion is permitted where there is a threat to the “life or health of the mother.” But very few abortions take place on this ground, for the simple reason that in almost every country, including America, the vast majority of abortions take place in the first trimester.

When we voted to remove the right to life of the unborn from our Constitution in 2018, the wild celebrations in Dublin Castle, one of our main public buildings, seemed to start an international trend. Since then, various states in America have marked the further liberalization of their abortion laws by lighting up prominent buildings and so on. France did the same earlier this year when its parliament voted in favor of making abortion an actual constitutional right. The Eiffel Tower in Paris was lit up with the message “My Body My Choice” in front of cheering crowds.

There was a time when pro-choice campaigners called abortion a regrettable necessity for some women that should only happen rarely. But now it seems to be a cause of celebration, and no regrets are expressed by the pro-choice camp no matter how high the number of abortions rises. Unfortunately, that celebration in Dublin Castle seemed to mark the day when the pro-choice movement shifted towards regarding abortion as something positive, like a birth. In fact, there is an organization in Ireland that, along with weddings and birth celebrations, offers an abortion ritual to those who want it.

All of the above is by way of setting the scene for a surprising recent development in Ireland—one that will encourage the readers of the Human Life Review—namely, the resounding defeat of two more referendums intended to usher us further down the path of “progress.” And these were referendums that the government was extremely confident they would win.

The voting took place on March 8, International Women’s Day, and the referendums were supported by every party in the Dail (Ireland’s parliament) with the exception of Aontu, which has only one TD (Peadar Toibin, who played a very prominent role in the No campaign).

One of the referendums was intended to change the section of the Irish Constitution that deals with the family. You might have thought there would be no further move to change this section once the referendum allowing same-sex marriage had been passed, but—as I predicted at the time—liberals would not stop there.

The Yes side in 2015 campaigned under the banner “Yes to Equality.” But the logic of this had to be extended beyond marriage to all types of families. Even after the same-sex marriage referendum, the Constitution still pledged the state to guard marriage with “special care.” This was considered discriminatory by liberals. What about single parent families and cohabiting couples? Why not guard them with “special care” as well?

Therefore, the government decided to try and add the term “durable relationships” to the Constitution, meaning the state would now be required to support marriage and other families based on “durable relationships,” whatever that might mean. More about this further on.

The second referendum targeted a provision of the Constitution feminists have long disliked, namely the section dealing with women in the home. This part of the Irish Constitution has always been mischaracterized by opponents as stating that a woman’s place is in the home. But it does no such thing. What it says is that mothers should not be forced out of the home and into the workplace by “economic necessity.” In other words, they should be given a choice. It’s worth quoting the relevant provision in full:

In particular, 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.

This hearkens back to a time when it was commonplace for social policy, whether in America, Ireland, Britain, or even Sweden, to try and protect the home from the dictates of the workplace.

The Irish Constitution was passed in 1937. We have to cast our mind back to what things were like at that time. The Great Depression was still raging, and we had a fraction of the prosperity we have today. Even leaving aside the Great Depression, it could often be very hard for the average family to guarantee a decent meal on the table every day. Sometimes everyone in the family had to work, and that could include the children as soon as they were able. That left the home empty by day. But if both parents were out working for long hours each day and the children were not, who would look after them? Most children in that era were not in school past the age of 12. Often the children were simply left wandering the streets.

In America, Ireland, and elsewhere, the trade unions were often in the forefront of efforts to create the economic conditions that would allow mothers to stay at home with their children if they wanted. They wished fathers to be able to earn what was called a “family wage”; that is, to earn enough to support a family on one pay packet. This is why men often earned more than women for the same job.

Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, was extremely harsh towards middle-class married women who worked. She felt they were taking away jobs from those who needed them when jobs were scarce. She said at one point: “The woman ‘pin-money worker’ who competes with the necessity worker is a menace to society, a selfish, shortsighted creature, who ought to be ashamed of herself.” “Pin-money” meant money for luxuries, not necessities, and many families during the Great Depression (and not only then) could, as we have noted, barely put food on the table.

And this point of view was not just a product of the Depression. Even before it, nine American states forbade married women from taking up jobs on the public payroll; by 1940, this number had risen to 26.

I point this out because many here in Ireland think we were unique in our social policy of trying to make it economically possible for a married woman to stay at home with her children. We also think we were unique in having a “marriage bar,” that is, a rule against married women having a job paid for by the state. We believe this was all the result of the “misogynistic” attitudes of the Catholic Church, but as we have seen, almost identical policies existed under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, no one’s idea of a Catholic reactionary. Sometimes there is a horribly parochial side to debates in Ireland, where it is assumed that all the “sins” of the past (real or imagined) were somehow solely the result of the years of Catholic influence. But Ireland was only unusual in putting into its Constitution the wish that mothers not be forced out of the home by economic necessity.

As in every other referendum, all of the mainstream media were lined up on one side. They parroted the line of Government Minister Roderic O’Gorman that the relevant provision of the Constitution was archaic, sexist, and out-of-date. Rather piously he declared: “A woman’s place is wherever she wants it to be.”

This is true, of course, but what he totally overlooked is that a lot of women would actually like to be at home with their children and sometimes do not care for their jobs or the long commutes to work. (Plenty of men feel the same way.)

During the referendum, the Iona Institute (which I run) commissioned an opinion poll that asked the following question: “If you had the option (and money was no issue) would you prefer to be a stay-at-home mother?” A whopping 69 percent answered that they would, against just 22 percent who said they would not. The remainder said they did not know. (The question was identical to one put to women some years before by another organization— Sudocream, as it happens—and the result was almost exactly the same.)

So the government was trying to pull a fast one. It was telling women that it wished to give them the freedom to go out to work, but really it wanted to take away the freedom to stay at home if that is what they wanted. Government policy is extremely biased towards work, and any policies that still favor the home somewhat (such as the Child Benefit welfare payment) are a throwback to the past. The government wants everyone out working because it wants as many of us as possible to be taxpayers.

If indeed the old attitude was that a mother’s place is in the home, then the new attitude is that a mother’s place is in the workplace and a child’s place is in day care.

But the public suddenly woke up to the fact that a fast one was being pulled. Despite the heavy backing of the National Women’s Council (a lavishly state-funded leftwing NGO), people began to realize that even if the language of the Constitution was old-fashioned, the general sentiment behind it, namely that mothers should not be forced out of the home by economic necessity, was not.

Quite a number of female commentators who had voted to delete the prolife clause from our Constitution in the referendum of 2018 came out on the No side this time, which badly wrong-footed the government and the National Women’s Council.

As we have seen, in the end the attempt to replace the “women-in-the-home” provision was defeated by an enormous three-to-one margin. The government thought it was a clever move to hold that referendum on International Women’s Day, but they obviously forgot that two days later it would be Mother’s Day in Ireland. That symbolism was lost on them.

The second referendum held on March 8 concerned the family. As in other societies, and for a very long time, a family headed by a husband and wife was seen as the “gold standard” family. The social consequences of “living in sin” or having children outside marriage were severe. But all previous societies have arrived at some version of marriage for the simple reason that all societies have determined that it is better, all other things being equal, for the man and the woman who bring a child into the world to commit to each other and then raise that child together.

However, Western societies, including Ireland, don’t really believe this anymore. Cohabitation rates have soared, and around 40 percent of children are now born outside marriage. Divorce rates are climbing, and marriage rates are falling. It’s no coincidence that abortion rates are also rising. In 2019, the first full year after we legalized abortion in Ireland, 6,666 Irish women had an abortion. Last year the total was over 10,000. To put this in context, there were around 54,000 births. To put it in further context, the year before we repealed our pro-life amendment, around 2,800 Irish women went to England for an abortion. Even if you allow that some Irish women were illegally obtaining the abortion pill online, our abortion rate has soared since we took our pro-life clause out of the Constitution. That clause saved many lives.

Why is the decline in marriage connected to abortion? Because married women are much less likely to have an abortion than unmarried women.

In any event, because so many couples in Ireland no longer marry, the government decided it needed to give something it called “durable relationships” constitutional protection. The change was aimed at single parents and cohabiting couples. Groups representing single parents (who are overwhelmingly mothers) complained that they were not recognized by the Constitution, because the only type of family mentioned is the family based on marriage, and with so many children being raised outside of marriage, this was unfair and discriminatory. Cohabitation is also widespread in Ireland, especially in working-class communities, and often this is not a precursor to marriage, but an alternative to it.

The government justified the recognition of “durable relationships” in the Constitution as a way of acknowledging the reality of family diversity in Ireland. And they assumed that the public would be perfectly happy to go along with this. After all, if the public had voted for same-sex marriage, why wouldn’t they take the next step along the road to “modern families”? It was a fair question.

But the proposal almost immediately ran into trouble. For a start, the government could not manage to define what a “durable relationship” was. Did the couple have to be living together, for instance, and for how long? Could you still be married to one person and in a “durable relationship” with someone else? If a Muslim man arrived in the country with two wives—or three, or four—would all of them be in a “durable relationship” and therefore entitled to constitutional protection? The government claimed not, but also said it would be up to the courts to decide.

Similarly, what about people in so-called polyamorous relationships? Would they be given constitutional protection? Again, the government said they would not, but could make no guarantees. And how far out would “durable relationships” extend? There were concerns that recognizing the term would mean increased immigration, because someone from, say, India, who came to live in Ireland might not only be allowed to bring in immediate family (a spouse and children), but other family members. Again, the government said this would not happen, but then legal advice to the government was leaked showing that it might.

The proposal ran into another unexpected problem aside from the sheer uncertainty around what the term actually meant; a lot of cohabiting couples and single mothers in relationships did not want those relationships to receive legal recognition. The position of many cohabiting couples is that if they want to marry, then they will marry. In many cases they are avoiding marriage, for the time being anyway, specifically because they are not ready to enter into legal obligations to one another—and might never be.

In the case of lone mothers, they might not particularly like the father of their child. But if the referendum passed, and they were in a relationship with that man for a few years, would this now be considered a “durable relationship,” legally speaking, and therefore be something like marriage, with enduring ties even after a breakup?

The very strange thing about the government’s proposal is that it seemed to be trying to impose a version of marriage on people who were trying to avoid precisely that. Liberal societies are supposed to be about freedom of choice, but the government seemed to want to abolish the option of living together with no strings attached.

Perhaps this is one reason why the parts of the country with the biggest majority voting against the proposal to create this new legal concept of a “durable relationship” were those with the largest concentration of single mothers. Both the government and the National Women’s Council were totally blindsided by this.

The two votes were a severe jolt to the government. They had expected to win easily, and certainly they had not expected to lose both referendums by huge margins. A few days after the referendums, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar resigned. He probably would have done so in due course anyway, because the office seems to have worn him out, but the sheer scale of the defeats ushered him through the exit door sooner.

Varadkar had become a kind of symbol of “woke” Ireland. He is a gay man, born of an Indian father and an Irish mother, who changed his mind on both abortion and same-sex marriage once he saw that the political winds were blowing in favor of both.

He hoped that same wind would cause the most recent two referendums to prevail, but frankly the public are getting a bit sick of “woke” politics and were in a mood to hit back. Leo Varadkar’s successor as Taoiseach is Simon Harris. But Harris was health minister when we had the abortion referendum in 2018, and he was extremely aggressive and arrogant towards the pro-life side. He is another politician who switched from being pro-life to being proabortion as soon as it was politically convenient. Surely he was the worst person to replace Varadkar?

However, Harris is nothing if not a ruthless pragmatist. As soon as he became Taoiseach, he started to tone down some of the “woke” rhetoric and put a “hate crime” bill on ice for the time being. Proposals to further liberalize our abortion law and to permit euthanasia have also been delayed for now.

This is not to say that the government won’t come back to these issues. They will—or whoever might succeed them after the next general election, due before next spring. But at least some of the wind has been taken out of the liberal sails for now, and that was not expected when the two referendums were announced. Irish prolifers and conservatives must take their crumbs of comfort where they can, and the two referendum results on March 8 were a lot better than we had expected. We have enjoyed those victories very much. They offer some respite ahead of the battles to come on issues like euthanasia and partially compensate for the heavy defeats in the referendums of 2015 and 2018.

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Original Bio:

David Quinn is a columnist with The Irish Independent and the Irish Catholic and the founder and director of The Iona Institute in Dublin (info@ionainstitute.ie.).