‘Lacklustre’ Varadkar blew vote on family, say coalition partners
Few thought Ireland would reject its elites’ attempt to change the constitution. It could be a prophetic result
THE Irish leader faced criticism from within his own government after it suffered a landslide defeat in referendums on changing the Irish constitution’s language around women in the home.
Friday’s poll resulted in the heaviest no vote for any referendum in Irish history and prompted a round of recriminations within the coalition, with Green ministers accusing Leo Varadkar of leading a lacklustre campaign.
Ireland’s coalition government admitted yesterday that it had failed to make a strong case for changing articles about women, marriage and family.
“We failed to articulate to the electorate why they should vote Yes and Yes in the referendums,” Pippa Hackett, the minister for agriculture, told RTE radio. “It’s a complex issue and there were many reasons why people voted ‘No’. We did maybe get the language wrong.”
Others have been more critical of Mr Varadkar. Joe O’brien, the Greens’ junior integration minister, told the Irish Independent: “It would have been good to see more people knocking on doors.”
“Certainly from our point of view in the Green Party we got people out, I am not sure what the other parties were doing.” The newspaper also cited another Green Party source blaming Mr Varadkar for holding the referendum on International Women’s day, but not campaigning forcefully enough to remove a clause in the constitution that said “women in the home” serve their country.
Mr Varadkar also faced criticism for saying in a television interview last week that care was “very much a family responsibility”, a remark that took off on social media and was seen by some as a repudiation of the state’s responsibilities.
The current wording of the constitution obliges the government to make sure mothers do not have to seek work out of economic necessity.
The government had pushed for proposals to amend Ireland’s 1937 constitution by changing articles dealing with women’s duties in the home and the definition of marriage and family.
All Ireland’s main parties, including Mr Varadkar’s Fine Gael, its Fianna Fail and Green coalition partners, and opposition Sinn Fein and Labour parties, had backed yes votes.
Mr Varadkar had warned that a “no” vote would set the country back.
Polls had suggested that both amendments would pass, although a large number of voters remained undecided.
But the simultaneous referendums on Friday – one for each section being amended – returned what Mr Varadkar acknowledged were “two wallops” of no votes.
Sixty-seven per cent of people voted no in the “family” referendum on the definition of marriage. The “care” referendum on women’s role in the home was defeated by 73.9 per cent to 26.1 per cent.
Turnout was just 44 per cent – a significant drop from the abortion referendum in 2018, which had a turnout of 64 per cent. The stakes were lower this time, however, and the government is expected to survive the defeat.
Angela Eagle MP has given a depressing glimpse into life under a Labour government, tweeting a wish list of pro-trans laws designed to complete a sexual revolution that, confusingly, appears to be permanent. Conversion therapy ban, modernised gender recognition, a LGBT envoy to spread the gospel of queer theory to the backwards bits of the empire.
Well, if Keir Starmer is signed-up to Angela’s agenda, he might want to think again. Elites in Ireland have just discovered there is a limit to how woke a nation is willing to go…
Last week, Eire held a referendum to “modernise” its constitution on two points: to include families not based on marriage and to rewrite references to a “mother’s duties in the home”. In short, to expunge what Taoiseach Leo Varadkar called “sexist” language. Every party campaigned for a Yes-yes vote – bar a curious Left-wing pro-life group called Aontu – and some of my conservative friends sat it out. They’ve been burnt by losing referendums on gay marriage in 2015 and abortion in 2018 – both times badly – and this looked like another easy win for “modern Ireland”.
On the day, everyone was surprised. The country voted “no” to the families language by 68 per cent; “no” to redefining the role of women by a staggering 74 per cent. The media reacted as if Ireland had given douze points to Gilead; the problem, suggested supporters, was not the reform itself but the government’s failure to sell it. Nevertheless with a majority this big, we can infer that thousands of single mothers, carers and feminists voted against amendments that the elite told them were in their sectional interests. Why?
One problem was the heavy-handed appeal to an extra-democratic consensus. A citizens assembly was involved – the deliberative bodies of voters informed by experts that Starmer is said to be flirting with here – and the National Women’s Council, a powerful non-governmental organisation, was on board. According to a report published in 2021, Ireland, a land of just five million, has about 34,000 NGOS, receiving €6billion of public money (for comparison: the health budget is ordinarily north of €20 billion). The vast majority are small and do excellent charitable work. Some, like the Council, receive funds from the taxpayer to lobby their own government to make Ireland more right-on – shifting the locus of authority away from the ballot box, encouraging a continuity of direction regardless of who is in office. This is what social democratic administrations always do. They write laws and pack quangos with activists, so that even when they lose power, they retain institutional control.
Smelling a stitch-up, different groups of voters began to spot problems with the constitutional edits. The Left said they didn’t go far enough, failing to guarantee support for carers and leaving the disabled dependent on their household (matriarchy replaced by free market anarchy). Farmers worried that the introduction of a new notion of “durable relationship”, as opposed to marriage, would lead to vexatious claims over inheritance. Voters feared that the wording might make migration easier, even give tacit endorsement to polygamy.
The elite replied that all this was scaremongering, that the very human goal was to recognise kids born outside marriage – yet one judge defined “durable relationships” as “intimate, romantic or sexual”, ie nothing to do with children at all. In a compelling TV debate, the Tanaiste Michéal Martin articulated the unspoken message of the “Yes-yes” campaign when he accused “No” proponent Maria Steen of representing a reactionary Ireland. Young Mrs Steen retorted that it was actually Martin who embodies a failed, ageing consensus.
It is the political elite that has destroyed single-earner households through bad economic policies and crippled social care via underfunding, and its answer to the problems it has created is to reaffirm some gibberish about equality and diversity. Here in Britain, above every police station that has ceased solving crimes, hospital with a waiting list and school with mentally ill students, flies a pride flag – proof that our betters might have wrecked the country, but they do care.
I’d love to write that the 2-1 defeat was a win for ancient, Catholic Ireland, heralding the return of St Patrick to chase out the snakes. But it wasn’t. Rather it was a loss for the new, bourgeois elite that lazily and arrogantly over-reached, misreading popular attitudes that are rarely strictly conservative or liberal but always “contemporary”.
Progressives assume Ireland is on a long march towards a new society, but many citizens probably saw liberalising gay marriage and abortion as a short jog to catch up with the rest of the world. In an age when few believe in God, let alone that marriage is a sacrament revolving around children, why not allow gay men and lesbians to have a wedding, too? Voters felt they had nothing to lose in earlier referendums, only freedoms to gain.
By contrast, millions see the trans debate as threatening to take something away, specifically their own identity and protections as a woman. Consider this: the Irish government held a referendum on gender neutrality, taking the word “mother” and its particular role out of the constitution, in the same week as Mother’s Day. It was a step too far.
So too was the referendum in Australia last year on expanding indigenous rights – rejected 60-40, the no campaign led by a woman of indigenous descent. It’s instructive that the Australian plebiscite was triggered by a Labor government that, in opposition, had proclaimed itself as moderate, insisting that they were a vote to kick out the conservatives rather than to elect a radical programme. Starmer is now doing exactly the same. Angela Eagle’s little list of LGBTQ+ laws suggests a more courageous agenda.
The calculation, one suspects, is that with the economy so bad, redistribution is unaffordable – so it will be cheaper for the future Labour government to leave its mark by using regulations and redefinitions to affirm officially, in perpetuity that men are toxic, everyone is a racist and being a woman is a figment of the imagination. If so, one trusts Starmer will quickly find that just as there’s no money left for socialism, there’s zero patience for performative woke nonsense.
It was a loss for the new bourgeois elite that lazily and arrogantly overreached, misreading popular attitudes