Real equality? No, let’s just have a referendum

ISHOULD probably regret this more but I was a nerdy teenager, and instead of spending money on cider and pool cues, I bought what I thought would be my first copy of the Constitution in the 1980s. It cost £1.28. The Eighth Amendment was a mere loose-leaf addition to it. thought I’d buy another when the divorce referendum passed the following year but, lo and behold, it didn’t pass. Then I quickly lost track of all the referendums we were having.

You couldn’t travel, you could travel; there wasn’t information, there was information; there was divorce, in the end; there was a somewhat repetitive Grand Tour of Europe – Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, Nice again, Lisbon, Lisbon again...

Eventually, dazed and confused, I decided to keep my original copy, which now bears so little resemblance either to the Constitution written by Eamon de Valera or the Constitution of today that it’s like the apocrypha. I have in my hands a 7’ by 5’ codex of 1980s Ireland.

Including the vote to repeal the Eighth, the Constitution has been amended 36 times. That’s taking into account the number of times we’ve decided in haste against amending it and then repented at leisure. (Yes I’m talking about you, Abolition of the Seanad.) We’ve had 16 referendums in the 21st century alone.

But keep those pencils sharpened everyone, because there are another six referendums coming up over the next year. One of these, scheduled for October, is on Article 41.2 which recognises the value of ‘woman’s life in the home’ and pledges to ensure that ‘mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home’.

You can see why they would want to get rid of this. It’s high time we put an end to the practice of mothers being constitutionally obliged to stay at home to mind their children, and the State being constitutionally obliged to support them in so doing.

What’s that you say? You’ve been working all this time, Constitution be damned? You work because, short of renting a bedsit in Banagher or marrying a hospital consultant, how are you supposed to get a roof over your head otherwise? You work because you like working and there’s life after children? What would Mr de Valera say? In fact Mr de Valera would say nothing because, despite all the noise that’s been made (and will be made from now on) about Article 41.2, Bunreacht na hÉireann maintains a polite silence about women working.

Stand up anyone whose life has been materially affected by this clause. Stand up anyone who’s taken a Supreme Court challenge over the ‘economic necessity’ to work. Article 41.2 is the constitutional version of a doily: it doesn’t help anyone and it doesn’t get in anyone’s way.

This amendment has been years in the making, with myriad thermal units of hot air expended on it over the decades by review groups, commissions, and Oireachtas committees. The UN has long been making us feel bad about it. The Constitutional Convention in 2013 decided it ought to be made gender-neutral and a subsequent obligatory Task Force recommended more or less the same. However, everyone agrees it’s just words; it means nothing. So now the Cabinet has approved a proposal to delete it altogether.

Justice minister Charlie Flanagan wants to use the occasion to spark a debate on gender equality. I can think of less grandiose – and cheaper – ways of sparking debate.

The Constitution is riddled with gender anachronisms. For instance, the President, the Taoiseach, the Attorney General, every judge and every member of both Houses of the Oireachtas – all are referred to as ‘He’ throughout. Call me lethargic but I find I don’t mind. Old-fashioned document is old-fashioned. I would mind very much if they actually were all men, but they’re not.

What we’re doing here is cosmetic. The Government has now developed a taste for the feel-good ballots; they make us look hip and take our minds off other things.

And yet 81 years since the clause was written, most of the people doing the caring at home for children and elderly and infirm relatives are still women.

If only the Constitution were as outmoded as we like to think.