WE THOUGHT THE NATION WAS DIVIDED. TURNS OUT IT REALLY ISN’T

This referendum proves there is no urban-rural divide, no age divide, no gender divide, no class divide... we have decided, for once, to trust politicians and to live in a tolerant society

THE past is indeed another country. In unprecedented numbers the Irish people have spoken and decided to reject a past which was infused with misogyny, shame, and a slavish devotion to authority in all its political and social forms. The then radical decision to insert the Eighth Amendment into the Constitution in 1983 was overwhelmingly approved by the people in a national referendum. The turnout was only 53.7%, the population was traditional and conservative.

Thirty-five years later, the owners of that Constitution, the Irish people, now more progressive and better educated, have decided that their book is no place for private or indeed moral matters. In an inverted mirror image of the 1983 referendum vote, two thirds of the electorate on Friday voted to remove the Eighth Amendment.

All across the country people decided to actually trust politicians to respect their decision to vote Yes and legislate as they said they would do. There is now practically no rural-urban divide, no age divide, no gender divide, no class divide.

Since the 1986 divorce referendum, the march of Irish history on social and moral issues has been one way.

From the 1992 abortion referendums in the aftermath of the X case on the so-called substantive issue, the right to information and the right to travel, through the 1995 divorce referendum, the 2002 abortion referendum, the 2012 children’s rights referendum, the 2015 marriage equality referendum and Friday’s vote, Irish people have considerably and incrementally voted in a progressive fashion.

This is expressed by the fact that the RTÉ exit poll showed that most of those who voted Yes in the marriage equality referendum also voted Yes on Friday.

The Constitution is a sacred book; the northern star of how Irish society and its people view their country. On children’s rights, same-sex marriage and now abortion, the Irish people have indicated how they want their country to look.

That Constitution has often been treated with disdain and contempt by politicians. A frivolous referendum on the age of eligibility to be president in 2015 and the decision not to do anything about the two Seanad referendums of 1979 and 2013 show the sometimes à la carte attitude to the Constitution shown by our political representatives.

Going back to the 1983 referendum, the Constitution was effectively hijacked by pro-life activists who managed to persuade both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael that the only way to protect the unborn was to insert the Eighth Amendment.

Back then, 85% of voters aligned themselves with the two main parties, and took their lead on the amendment from them. That figure for the two main parties is now barely 50%, and on constitutional issues the people make up their own minds on social and moral issues without recourse to our political elites.

Or, indeed, the Catholic Church whose absolute moral authority on abortion, and indeed much else, has been sundered through its own failures in relation to tackling sex abuse by clerics. The fact that 84% of young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 voted Yes speaks volumes as to how this group of voters view political authority no matter where it comes from.

MANY of them viewed this as not a political issue, but one that was purely personal for them. In that context this referendum has challenged all sorts of stereotypes about modern Ireland. Rural Irish people experience real life too. They experience abortions.

And female rights campaigners and reproductive rights activists are not too shrill to influence and win a referendum campaign, as was seen through the Together For Yes civil society campaign.

The telling of personal stories was central to this campaign and these stories clearly resonated across the land.

The middle ground of Ireland has clearly shifted and moved substantially. The Citizens’ Assembly was clearly ahead of the political class, first of all through the all-party Oireachtas committee and then the decision by the Cabinet and Dáil to put the referendum to the people. In that context the deliberations and results of the Citizens’ Assembly precisely accorded with the deliberations and results of Irish public opinion as expressed in Friday’s referendum.

Accusations from the No campaign that it was somehow a liberal political elite foisting its extreme views on a public have been well and truly quashed by this result.

But this was also a vitally important political campaign with enormous significance for both the political system and Ireland’s two centrist parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. A defeat would have been calamitous for Fine Gael and particularly Leo Varadkar, whose message of leading an open, pluralist, tolerant society would have been left in tatters.

Not for the first time, Varadkar’s political antennae and nous have been proved right. He will now go down in history as the Taoiseach who delivered the end of the Eighth Amendment, which has proved so complicated for every taoiseach since Garret FitzGerald led the government that oversaw its implementation but was personally horrified by it.

The shining star for Fine Gael, however, was Health Minister Simon Harris, whose barnstorming performance on RTÉ’s Prime Time debate last Tuesday must have reassured many within the Yes campaign. The health service remains an enormous challenge politically but Harris will have banked much credit from his leadership of the Yes campaign. Fine Gael will hope that this credit translates into votes across the country in the looming general election.

Perhaps the big winner, because he had the most to lose, is the Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin. The majority of his parliamentary party and indeed the grassroots, have been against him since January when he came out and asserted his position to repeal the Eighth Amendment. The big question he faces, however, is, who does the Fianna Fáil party he leads represent now?

It has long been assumed that it is Martin’s destiny to never lead his soldiers into government. Recent polls have been nothing short of disastrous for him but the polls were equally terrible for Fianna Fáil prior to the 2016 general election, yet by the end of that campaign Martin was within touching distance of being Taoiseach.

BUT if Micheál Martin is to lead our country, his Fianna Fáil will need to attract Yes voters, particular in Dublin. And TDs such as Jack Chambers in Dublin West, Darragh O’Brien in Fingal, Seán Haughey in Dublin Bay North and John Curran in Dublin Mid-West all advocated a No vote.

It remains to be seen whether the overwhelming numbers of Yes voters in their constituencies will punish them. Yet these TDs and indeed Fianna Fáil as a whole might well be saved by those No voters who feel they have nowhere else to go politically. Nationally there are over 650,000 of them.

Referendums are, however, no indicator of how general elections will turn out. Just look at Labour’s efforts to get the same sex marriage issue to a referendum and passed, and what happened to them at the general election just nine months later when the party was practically obliterated.

For now, though, party politics takes a back seat. The vast phalanx of Yes voters across age, geography, gender and class, have decided that they want to live in an inclusive, compassionate Ireland. That is the country to which they marched via the ballot box on Friday.