The Irish Government plans to hold a series of referenda in November 2023 to further alter the Irish Constitution as the next stage in its radical modernisation. Announced on March 8, International Women’s Day, An Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar confirmed that three changes to the 86-year-old constitution are being proposed, with the exact wording to be formulated by the parliament in coming months.
The announcement follows a “Citizen’s Assembly on Gender Equality”, which issued a report two years ago with a long list of recommendations for the government.
A Special Oireachtas (parliament) Committee on Gender Equality was established after this and met from December 2021 to consider the Citizens’ Assembly recommendations.
This committee concluded its work and published its final report last December. In this report, the committee set out its own recommendations and an action plan, including recommendations for a referendum or referenda on Articles 40 and 41 of the constitution.
Chaired by now Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik and comprised primarily of socially “progressive” members of parliament, the committee’s recommendations have long been considered a foregone conclusion, a matter of when rather than if.
In her foreword to the committee report, Bacik attempted to speak for the people, pre-empting the result of the popular vote: “It has long been agreed that the way in which women and mothers are referred to in Article 41 is based on outdated gender stereotypes and should have no place in a constitutional text. In addition, the definition of family in the same Article has long been criticised for being insufficiently inclusive of diverse family forms in contemporary Ireland.”
Article 40 of the Constitution states that “All citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law”. The recommendation is that this article is to be updated to include a reference to “gender equality” and “inclusion”, with a number of ways of doing this proposed. Rather than all being equal under the law, equality will be determined by group identity.
It is proposed that Article 41 is to be changed in a number of ways – purportedly to remove an outdated reference to “a woman’s place in the home”, replacing it with gender-neutral language, and to extend the meaning of “family” to recognise a modern perception of family as more wide-ranging than the one founded on marriage.
The current wording of Article 41 is long and covers a range of issues:
1.1° 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.
1.2° The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.
2.1° 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.
2. 2° 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.
3 1° The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.
…
4 Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.
The report defines the current wording and definition of the family as “narrow, outdated, and exclusionary”, and has the aim of removing the recognition of the family as one founded in marriage.
Additionally, proposals for addressing the valued role of the woman in the home and the responsibility of the state to “ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home” is either to be removed or amended to include gender-neutral language in relation to care responsibilities.
Addressing this issue when announcing the referenda, Irish Prime Minister stated:
“For too long, women and girls have carried a disproportionate share of caring responsibilities, been discriminated against at home and in the workplace, objectified or lived in fear of domestic or gender-based violence.”
The constitutional clause causes none of these problems and indeed the removal of it will do nothing to solve them, to the extent they still exist. In fact, the Irish High court has already determined, in its reading of the article on “the woman in the home”, that it applies to carers in the home in general, male or female, parent, or sibling.
Ireland has been inundated with referenda to amend the Constitution originally written in 1937 in the last 30 years, whether to accommodate EU treaty changes or, more recently, to adapt to social changes that have overtaken what was until reasonably recently a deeply Catholic nation.
Each referendum in recent years has removed what many perceived to be socially conservative and Catholic elements of the constitution, including bans on divorce and abortion, while changing the constitution to permit same-sex marriage.
The proposed changes, while not explicitly addressing any Catholic elements, are designed to “modernise” through the inclusion of the “progressive” language of equality and identity, and the introduction of a subjective and ill-defined reference to “gender” as opposed to biological sex.
While the changes are couched in the language of equality, it is unclear what will be achieved by altering the existing commitment to equality for all with the addition of qualifiers such as gender and other proposed identifiers, aside from the “feel-good” factor of self-perceived modernity and the possibility of causing further division through constitutionally recognising the equality of identity groups as opposed to individuals.
Writing in the Times, Brenda Power takes aim at the proposed erasure of women from the constitution:
“Instead of removing it, to replace “women” with gender-neutral “carers” — despite the fact that the majority are in fact female — why not try, belatedly, to honour it? There’s really nothing shameful in a woman choosing motherhood over a job outside the home, but scouring the constitution of all references to a gendered domestic role strongly suggests that it is, indeed, an option to be quietly deplored. And just to copper-fasten the suggestion that this proposed new constitutional change will be a heroic liberation of women from their household drudgery, plans for the “gender equality” referendums were announced on International Women’s Day (IWD).”
The proposed changes to the caring responsibilities are framed as addressing or redressing wrongs done to women and supported by social progressives, women’s groups and much of the “establishment”. The current wording is frequently referred to, disingenuously and dishonestly, as the “woman’s place in the home” clause, ostensibly reinforcing a perception that the Constitution prefers the woman, or mother, to spend her life in the home carrying out caring duties and somehow restricting her ability to enter into economic life and follow a career.
The problem in recent years is that government policy has completely neglected this aspect of the Constitution and created, both by omission and commission, an economic and social climate that almost compels both parents to enter the workforce, with the government frequently congratulating themselves for policy such as tax individuation and subsidies for institutional childcare.
Parents, whether mothers or fathers, who would prefer to carry out their own childcare, are offered no incentives or support to “not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”. Rendering the clause gender neutral has no practical effect aside from removing the assumed protection for women and mothers, enforcing a hardened version of gender equality that seems to be to the benefit of the male.
Of course, while the assumed parental and spousal roles from 1937 are not specially Catholic, this neutralising of language is at odds with the Catholic interpretation of the different and complementary roles of the (male and female) parents of children which are predominantly in line with the natural instincts of the majority of parents.
With all the changes to the constitution in recent years, what will remain is an oddly formed document that includes a preamble recognising the authority of God
[“In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, We, the people of Éire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial”]
but whose content is entirely defined by the authority of, and submission to, temporal and changeable language of social progressives.
(Supporters celebrate at Dublin Castle following the Irish referendum result on the 8th amendment concerning the country’s abortion laws on May 26, 2018 in Dublin, Ireland | Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
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