Voters deserve respect

Ireland’s rugby team were not the only losers from the Emerald Isle at the weekend. Leo Varadkar’s government was trounced in a referendum about changing the country’s constitution to make it more “inclusive”.

Proposals to alter wording to include families not based on marriage were defeated, with 68 per cent voting “no”. There was an even more resounding rejection of a second proposition to reword a section referring to the role of women in the home.

The result was greeted with the usual anguish in progressive circles that always assume everyone else thinks as they do. We saw it with Brexit here and with the election of Trump in America in 2016. It happened in Australia with a referendum aimed at giving native Aborigines more rights than other citizens, which many voters felt would be divisive.

One Left-wing newspaper responded to the Irish vote with the headline “Where did it go wrong?” as though the obvious result should have been in favour. The usual excuses were trotted out – misinformation, internet trolls, a failure to explain properly and the rest. Only the old anti-democratic adage that “we would have done better with a different electorate” was missing.

There is another explanation: people don’t like being told what to think by their political and cultural elites. Most people in Ireland probably subscribe to the view that stable families outside marriage should be treated equally and that a woman’s place is no longer in the home – these were not especially contentious. Moreover, that they should be followed by the government without changing the constitution, as they are in countries where it is not written down, like the UK.

It should by now have become apparent to the political establishment everywhere that voters will see through virtue-signalling exercises designed to make politicians feel better about themselves.