However you vote, the sky won’t fall in

DESPITE the efforts of campaigners, State bodies and policy groups to tempt us to do otherwise, I’m not overthinking Friday’s referendum.

My reasoning is that – again contrary to the line sold us by campaigners about the vote’s massive social implications – I don’t believe the parts of the Constitution in question are that significant.

The courts are a revolving door of litigants fighting over their constitutional rights to property, their good name or their bodily integrity. Now I’m no expert but I have never read of a mother taking the State to task for forcing her out to work to support her family. Article 41.2.2 states: ‘The State shall therefore endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.’ No one has ever taken that as anything other than an ideal, an aspiration dreamt up by de Valera in the 1930s, a relic of old Ireland.

What is the problem with getting rid of meaningless and obsolete articles and replacing them with an article that’s just as aspirational but a better mirror of contemporary Ireland? The proposed Article 42B is a nod to caring in families no longer being a woman-only duty. Sure, in reality children and the elderly are mostly still cared for by women, but it’s still more in step with daily life that the sexism inherent in cherishing women’s work in the home.

Similarly, the change to Article 41.1.1, to expand the definition of family by adding ‘whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships’ only acknowledges what we already know to be the truth about modern families.

For what it’s worth, I’ll be voting yes/yes but I won’t be losing any sleep over it. Whichever side wins, the sky won’t fall in.