“Woke is Dead”, read the banner. “It was all wokism demeaning window-dressing”, said the main voice of the ‘NO’ campaign, Michael McDowell, former Tánaiste and leader of the late and unlamented Progressive Democrats.

The Family and Care referendums, analysed previously here and here were massively defeated, the latter by the biggest ever No vote in a referendum. The amendment to the constitution on the family was defeated by 67.7 per cent of the votes and the care amendment by 73.9 per cent.

Both had been supported by the three government parties and by all but one of the opposition parties in the Dáil, including Labour, Social Democrats, Sinn Fein and People before Profit (PbP).  An ‘out-of-touch’ establishment turned out to include Sinn Fein and PbP, as well as several Non-Governmental Organisations, which supported a Yes vote.  The opposition parties all blamed the ineptness of the Government, a case not so much of rats leaving a sinking ship as jumping overboard when the ship was already at the bottom.  Sinn Fein ran so far away from the scene that it promised not to re-run the referendum, as it had previously promised if it was defeated.  It remains to be seen whether People before Profit will do the same and slink away from its similar promise in relation to ‘Care’.

The Irish Times sketch writer noted that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s acceptance of defeat was ‘a strangely nonchalant act of concession’, perfectly befitting the whole exercise, which was indeed “wokism demeaning window-dressing” but not only this.  The proposals also contained reactionary principles, as we set out in the two articles linked above.

On the family, it couldn’t tell anyone what the ‘durable relationships’ were that would receive constitutional ‘recognition’ or what this recognition would consist of, while it still claimed that ‘The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage’.  The Catholic right took this to be undermining the institution while others might have wondered how it was consistent with recognition of ‘durable relationships.’

The care amendment was bitterly opposed by some disability groups, who saw it as assigning responsibility for their care to their family and justifying the state’s abdication of any responsibility.  Varadkar let the cat out of the bag when he more or less accepted this interpretation in a media interview.

The referendum was rushed after having been delayed and without prior explanation or justification of the wording, which was deliberately withheld The debate in the Dáil was cut short with the vote pencilled in for International Women’s Day, which was taken by the electorate as a cynical ploy.

Varadkar stated that “the old adage is that success has many fathers and failure is an orphan”, but one person’s defeat is another one’s victory and the reasons for the victory of the No side were several, not limited to the arrogance of the Government.  The No vote included the opposition of right-wing Catholic opinion that is still a significant, if minority, force, while generally progressive voices could see through the lip service given to change, the reactionary implications of some of the wording, and the noted absence of other words (the word woman for example).

The care referendum was more obviously retrogressive, which prompted a slightly higher no vote and coloured many people’s appreciation of what the whole exercise was about.  The impulse to purge the existing constitution of sexism, encapsulated by a woman’s ‘life within the home’, was not enough to prompt a Yes vote, and at bottom reflects the point we made before: that no matter how reactionary it is it is not the cause of women’s disadvantage but rather reflects it.

Blame for failure of the Yes side has consisted of the unclear wording of the amendments; their change from that recommended by the Citizen’s Assembly; the government’s ‘hubris over strategy and superficiality over substance’ (Una Mullally, The Irish Times); the ‘immediate plunge into legalistic arguments’ (Una Mullally again), and the supposed ‘narrow’ campaign on the Yes side.

Since the Yes campaign included all the political parties except the smallest, the base of the Yes campaign wasn’t small. However, what was demonstrated were the limitations of the state’s political representation, including of the so-called anti-establishment parties, especially Sinn Fein.  As for the wording, its superficiality and legalistic ‘entanglement that never unravelled’, these were not accidental but intrinsic to the intention of the amendments that the Government simultaneously claimed were symbolic (but important) and meaningful (but unthreatening to the status quo).  No wonder it lost. 

Determining the nature of the vote can sometimes be established by looking at the consequences, which one journalist has called ‘a vacuum’ and another that while “it might not be the end of gesture politics . . . it will certainly give would-be gesturers pause for thought in future.’ (Pat Leahy in The Irish Times) He provides the example of some NGOs proposals for economic and social rights to be included in the constitution.  This is something we have opposed before and consider to be a complete diversion, misdirection, miseducation, and waste of time.

The threat of new Hate legislation is also offered as something that has government TDs worried about their popularity, if the public have the opportunity to understand it. The Irish government has previously passed the Gender Recognition Act with minimum publicity so that no opposition was likely to raise the issue of women’s rights.  Getting away with this now is more problematic as the profession of ‘progressive’ intentions loses its capacity to silence critical thought.  The referendum vote has certainly achieved this and for this alone it is to be welcomed.