The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
NO SIGNS OF RURAL URBAN SPLIT AS REPEAL WINS OUT
VOTERS ACROSS COUNTY WERE UNITED IN DECISION TO REPEAL THE EIGHTH
AHEAD of the referendum on the repeal of the Eighth Amendment there was much discussion of Ireland’s supposed urban/rural divide with many commentators predicting, incorrectly, that rural voters would back the status quo and vote ‘No’.
While there certainly is a divide between Dublin and the rest of Ireland on many issues, when it came to the matter of the Eighth Amendment, there was broad consensus.
Rural voters confounded the predictions of ‘expert’ liberal commentators and proved that rural Ireland is far from the bastion of right wing orthodoxy that many have claimed.
There were also similar predictions of a divide in individual constituencies with many expecting that voters in larger towns would back repeal while those in more isolated areas would support the pro-life campaign.
That too proved to be wildly inaccurate and in Kerry a significant majority of voters in almost every area voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment.
In all just 14 of the county’s 212 electoral divisions recorded majority ‘No’ votes, with most areas backing repeal by between 55 and 65 per cent.
While Kerry’s ‘Yes’ vote of 58.2 per cent was considerably lower than the national 66.4 per cent, voters in almost every region in Kerry backed repeal in considerable numbers giving the ‘Yes’ side a considerable margin of victory right across the Kerry constituency.
Voters in the county’s two main urban centres of Tralee and Killarney did back repeal in greater numbers, but the margins in most boxes were not dramatically wider than in most of the more rural electoral divisions.
Indeed, the largest support for repeal was in more rural areas and especially across west Kerry.
The highest individual margin of victory was seen in Listowel where the tallies of one ballot box showed 80 per cent support for repeal.
Voters in Dingle, Dún Chaoin, Castlegregory, an Muiríoch and Ballyferriter backed repeal of the Eighth by over 70 per cent.
Meanwhile in south Kerry there was also huge support for repeal in the greater Kenmare area where the electorate voted ‘Yes’ by between 67 and 70 per cent.
The vote last week broadly mirrors the 2015 marriage equality referendum when – as was the case last Friday – urban and rural areas across the county voted predominantly in favour of legalising same-sex marriages.
As was the case with much of the pre-referendum polling the predictions about the urban rural divide and the supposed differences between urban and rural voters were turned on their head.
If last Friday’s historic vote proves anything it is that the ‘quiet revolution’ we have witnessed in Ireland is, most certainly, not confined to the capital and the major cities.
The entire country – from the biggest cities to the smallest villages – has transformed and the conservative society many assumed still existed in rural Ireland has been swept away.