FF minister accused of going on ‘holiday’ a day before end of campaign Referendums blame game worsens cracks in Coalition
A FIANNA Fáil minister was accused of going on ‘holiday’ before the referendum campaign ended, the Irish Daily Mail can reveal.
James Browne, Minister of State at the Department of Justice, flew to Vietnam on March 7, the day before polling on two constitutional amendments last week.
Mr Browne was due in the Southeast Asian country as part of a St Patrick’s week ministerial mission, but his first official engagement was not scheduled until March 11, according to a Government Information Service itinerary.
However, Mr Browne flew out five days earlier.
The revelation will cause further tension between the Coalition parties, as the blame game over the devastating defeat of both the family and care referendums deepens.
A Department of Justice spokesman said Mr Browne voted by postal vote before leaving.
The Fianna Fáil press office and a spokesman for Tánaiste Micheál Martin failed to respond to our questions on how this postal vote was facilitated.
Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín has called on Mr Browne to explain how he received a postal vote.
He told the Mail: ‘Minister James Browne claims that he voted by postal vote. Citizens are only entitled to a postal vote because of work. Yet James Browne’s work only started three days after the referendum.’
He continued: ‘Every election and referendum, thousands of voters are disenfranchised because they are on holidays. They are refused postal votes because they are on holidays. And here we have a minister getting a postal vote for a time frame where he is on holidays. This is clearly not right.’
Mr Tóibín said it was incredible that the Government spent €23million on a referendum given the carefree approach to it taken by several Government TDs.
He said: ‘The fact that Minister James Browne went on holidays during the referendum campaign is also incredible.
‘The Government said that the referendum was urgent, that it was critical. They said they sought to usher in new rights for carers, that the referendum would lead to governments striving to support carers.
‘But incredibly, many of their elected reps weren’t even bothered to vote or properly campaign for the referendum.
‘I think this underlines how hollow this whole marketing campaign/referendum was.’
The family amendment, which proposed extending the meaning of family beyond one defined by marriage and to include those based on ‘durable’ relationships, lost by 67.7% to 32.3%.
The care amendment, which proposed deleting references to a woman’s role and duties in the home and replacing it with a new article acknowledging family care, lost by a significant margin of 73.9% to 26.1%.
The care vote is the highest ‘No’ vote in any Irish referendum. On RTÉ’s This Week programme, Fianna Fáil Minister of State Mary Butler said not everyone in Government did enough work to advocate for a Yes-Yes vote.
‘Not everybody got behind this across Government, I’ll be very clear about that. I do believe, if I’ve to be truly honest, that we could have done more, and we didn’t,’ she said.
Green Party Minister of State Joe O’Brien told the Irish Independent on the day of the count that he believed TDs in other Government parties did not pull their weight.
‘Certainly from our point of view in the Green Party, we got people out, I am not sure what the other parties were doing,’ he said.
The Irish Independent reported earlier this week that two Fine Gael senators, John McGahon and Garret Ahearn, did not vote in the referendum because they travelled to London for the Ireland versus England rugby international.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said he is ‘not their mammy’ and would not tell his party colleagues what
‘Many of their TDs weren’t bothered’ ‘I was never going to support that’
to do with their weekends.
‘Perhaps it was a trip that was organised long before polling day was set, I honestly don’t know,’ he said.
He added: ‘Certainly I wouldn’t be one who has missed many votes; I have missed the odd one for work reasons but I would always try to be there.’
On Tuesday, the Mail published images of Fianna Fáil’s Lisa Chambers, Leader of the Seanad, canvassing for a Yes-Yes vote in both ballots despite claiming not to have been involved in her party’s campaign.
Senator Chambers told the Mail that while she changed her mind in the final days of the campaign in relation to the care amendment, she would not have supported removing the word ‘mother’ from the Constitution.
‘I was never going to support that one, when I looked at it and saw the word mother taken out,’ she said.
However, it was revealed on Wednesday in the Mail that, more than a year earlier, Ms Chambers advocated for wording that would have removed the word ‘mother’ from the Constitution.
Ms Chambers was a member of the special cross-party Gender Equality Committee, established on foot of the Citizens’ Assembly, to examine issues such as constitutional amendments.
The committee, chaired by the leader of the Labour party, Ivana Bacik, produced a report in November 2022 of its key findings, including proposed wording for the care and family marriage referenda.
The wording in the report was not accepted by the Government, but crucially also would have removed the word ‘mother’ from the Constitution.