Minister’s job is to fight fake news, not spread it

WELCOMING the establishment of the Electoral Commission little over a year ago, Darragh O’Brien outlined its important role in ‘protecting and modernising our electoral landscape’.

The Minister for Housing and Local Government also said the new body ‘will be central to the administration, development and protection of our democratic processes and institutions’.

In an age when information has been weaponised and the threat to electoral systems has taken insidious new forms, this respect for the commission was to be expected, especially in the heart of Government.

Issue

So when the chair of the commission took issue with a senior minister’s claims about what the Constitution says about women, an instant retraction might have been expected. Judge Marie Baker bluntly told The Irish Mail on Sunday that Minister Catherine Martin’s post on X about the upcoming referenda was wrong.

Ms Martin declared that ‘It’s not reflective of today’s society for our Constitution to say that a woman’s place is in the home’.

As constitutional scholars and lawyers have Corrected: But Catherine Martin would not back down pointed out, it doesn’t say this at all. ‘It says something much more positive than that,’ Judge Baker said, explaining that it actually states ‘that the work that women do in the home, provides an important support to the common good to society’. When this was put to Minister Martin on Monday of this week, however, she was not of a mind to acknowledge her fault.

‘I would say for many women, the meaning, the actual import, the interpretation of that provision is quite clear; indeed it is often referred to (as) “the women in the home” provision,’ she told the media.

‘So by direct inference it is clear to many women how outdated it is, how offensive this provision is, and it is equivalent to implying that a woman’s place is in the home. Modern Ireland has no place for that.’

A minister who is lecturing RTÉ about its need for reform, and who is concerned with overhauling a national broadcaster in a time when the media landscape is menaced by bad actors, had the gall to insist that her interpretation of a constitutional provision, proven to be incorrect, somehow stands because of how people may feel about it.

The Government’s referendum campaigns have spiralled into dark farce, and have been exposed as being about vibes rather than facts. Constitutional change is sometimes necessary, but should only come about after extensive debate and for serious reasons.

Both look alarmingly absent in the case of the March 8 votes.

Minister Martin’s floundering performance betrayed the flimsy foundations of the Government campaigns for Yes votes in the referendums on family and carers.

That has been made painfully clear in contributions by Minister Roderic O’Gorman and Thomas Byrne, the junior minister whose calamitous performance on RTÉ Radio 1 was a stupefying mix of arrogance and ineptitude.

Expect efforts to be redoubled as March 8 approaches, but it beggars belief that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tánaiste Micheál Martin are content to see a senior colleague publish false information, see that statement contradicted by the chair of the body founded to safeguard electoral integrity – and then see that colleague double down.

Repercussions

The repercussions beyond these votes are important.

The threats to referenda and elections, and the information on which democratic societies are founded, are real, and they emanate from within the State and beyond it, too. Surely a government must lead the way in countering misinformation and disinformation by only dealing in facts and the truth itself.

That this needs pointing out, and to the minister who is responsible for disentangling the RTÉ mess, is lamentable.

Yet as of last night, Minister Martin’s tweet remained in place, albeit with hundreds of comments pointing out how wrong she was.

If this Government is convinced of its case in the two votes, then it should be able to make them plainly and persuasively.

Yet weeks into campaigning, no Government representative, nor any of the army of NGOs advocating for Yes, can explain what a durable relationship is, or counter the fury of exhausted carers who ask what changing the Constitution will do to improve their lives, or help those to whom they devote every hour of the day.

It would be embarrassing, if it weren’t so deeply cynical.