You’re not woke, Leo? So stop sleeping on the job!

WHAT is ‘woke’? Is it a compliment or an insult? Is it a boast or a rebuke? Ever since the Government’s ‘care’ and ‘family’ referendums got an apocalyptic trouncing at the polls, the word ‘woke’ has turned up frequently in the analysis of the results.

Were the voters who rejected the ‘care’ referendum (heaven forbid we should use the word ‘woman’ to describe it, since that was the offending term it sought to erase) by almost four to one simply too stupid to understand it? Or was it a deliberate and carefully timed kick in the gender-neutral goolies to the ‘woke’ agenda by an electorate which has lost patience with meaningless gesture politics designed only to make our achingly liberal elite look good?

Smarting

Still smarting from the failure of the great unwashed to listen to their betters, The Irish Times yesterday decreed that the term ‘woke’ is ‘a modern form of commitment to social justice that has its roots in Christian principles’.

Take that, Deputy Willie O’Dea, Senator Sharon Keogan, Senator Michael McDowell and all the other knuckledragging champions of the No vote who accused the Government of terminal ‘wokeness’ – who could possibly oppose such a noble cause? Well, the Taoiseach, for one. In Washington at the weekend, Leo Varadkar was asked if the Government had lost touch with the electorate by concentrating too much on ‘woke’ issues instead of bread-and-butter politics such as housing and health. Did he consider himself ‘woke’? The short answer was ‘no’, and he added: ‘I don’t think so. But I’ve never really been fully sure what “woke” and “antiwoke” means.’

Then, confusingly, he went on to suggest that ‘anti-woke’ people ‘just seem to be against whatever new idea or new concept it is…’

So does being ‘woke’ mean being in favour of new ideas and new concepts, then, and throwing out old ideas and old concepts such as ‘motherhood’, ‘marriage’ and the notion of ‘women’ as adult human females? There’s little doubt that a lot of women, in particular, saw the ‘care’ referendum in those terms, and refused to allow their care for their families and their contribution to the common good to be erased or dismissed as demeaning.

And given this Government’s apparent determination to remove the word ‘woman’ from legislation and official documents, it’s hard to blame them. We’re entitled to be offended by so-called ‘inclusive’ language that uses the word ‘woman’ in inverted commas in documents such as the Women’s Health Action Plan 2022, and explains that it’s just ‘shorthand for people who identify as women or people who don’t identify as women but share women’s biology’. Strangely enough, you’ll find no such apology in any public document using the word ‘men’.

Before the vote, the Taoiseach said that a Yes-Yes would ‘keep Ireland on a pathway of liberalism, tolerance and modernity’.

So if we value mothers, marriage and biological women, as the outcome seems to suggest, have we strayed from the path of liberal righteousness? Or is it possible to uphold some ‘old ideas and old concepts’ and still be a tolerant, modern, liberal, ‘live-and-let-live’ society? If we were asked to vote today on marriage equality or abortion referendums, would we disgrace ourselves before the world?

Of course not. The same people who voted Yes to those amendments overwhelmingly rejected the recent proposals, for one reason – compassion. We have an intelligent, discerning, informed and humane electorate, and the people saw the obvious social injustices to be addressed by those previous votes.

Everybody knew a gay couple, or a woman who’d gone to England for an abortion, and could no longer accept the hypocrisy of denying their realities.

Oppressed

But who were the poor, oppressed people in ‘durable relationships’ whom we needed to rescue? If they chose not to ask the State to recognise their commitments, by getting married, how could they really complain that the State didn’t recognise their commitments? Surely the people who needed our consideration were those who might find themselves drafted into ‘de facto’ marriages without their consent – Minister Roderic O’Gorman promised there’d be no ‘differential treatment’ between married or ‘durable’ couples – with all the legal implications of that eventuality?

And what about the poor, oppressed women chained to the kitchen sink by the Constitution? How would their lot be improved by being gender-neutralised as ‘family carers’ whom the Government would simply ‘strive to support’? As for those caring for disabled loved ones in genuinely dire straits, why would a compassionate electorate let the Government away with such a weasel-worded evasion of the support they urgently deserve?

Was this really a battle for the soul of the country between the ‘woke’ liberals and the ‘anti-woke’ conservatives – or did a smart electorate simply see through a vapid, legacy-building vanity project and save a dozy, virtue-signalling Government from an unholy mess of its own making? The Taoiseach may deny being ‘woke’, but he can’t say he hasn’t had one hell of a wake-up call.