We need to know why we were not told the truth about the referendums

WHAT almost happened? We are only gradually discovering the calibre of the bullet we dodged when we rejected the Government’s determined effort to amend the Constitution last month.

But the more we find out about what they knew in advance of the poll, and the more we learn of the warnings they got about the potential consequences of Yes votes, the more alarming it becomes.

In fact, it’s hard to know which scenario is more terrifying – that they didn’t really understand the level of mayhem that would follow if the proposals were successful, or that they knew full well and went ahead anyway.

Because but for the grace and good sense of the electorate, Minister Roderic O’Gorman would have gone into the history books as our own political Oppenheimer, unleashing a chain reaction of legal, financial, social, political and constitutional chaos that could have bankrupted the country.

Two weeks before the vote, the minister was asked a straight question in a newspaper interview: was it true to say the proposals being pushed by the Government, and supported by Sinn Féin, would have consequences for the laws on succession, tax, immigration, pensions and social welfare, among others?

Here was his answer: ‘No... the very clear advice we’ve received throughout from the Attorney General is that these items will not be impacted by what we’re proposing to amend in the Constitution.’

Yet Mr O’Gorman must have known, even as he was making that statement, that it simply wasn’t true.

The day before the vote, the ‘very clear advice’ that the Attorney General had actually provided to the Government was leaked. Here’s what it said, very clearly: ‘There is real potential for a significant volume of litigation consequent on the amendment… It is foreseeable that this could arise in areas such as health, childcare, social protection, education and immigration.’

In other words, the minister knew there was a real risk of chaos arising from a Yes/Yes vote, he knew it could have ‘significant financial implications’ for the State, but he flat out denied it.

And the truly mind-boggling level of warnings that the Government received about the consequences of these amendments, and which it refused to reveal ahead of the vote, doesn’t end there.

Yesterday, it emerged that senior officials in the Department of Justice had warned that the State would ‘not be able to regulate immigration’ if the definition of ‘family’ was amended to include ‘durable relationships’. In documents which the Government refused to release prior to the vote, a senior legal researcher in Justice states: ‘It is not an exaggeration to say that it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a meaningful immigration system should the people accept these amendments.’

Mr O’Gorman should have known about these warnings when he was reassuring us that immigration ‘would not be impacted’.

All of the units within the department, said the researcher, had ‘emphasised the extremely severe and extremely concerning effects of either/both of these amendments on their resources’.

And yes, these are the same amendments that Mr O’Gorman was claiming would have no effect whatsoever.

The lawyer pointed out that the current definition of family, as based on marriage, referred to a ‘small, tightly defined group of people’.

But if Mr O’Gorman got his way and this was expanded to include ‘durable relationships’, then applications for family reunification by ‘adult siblings, cousins, nieces/nephews, adult children, parents/grandchildren’ of refugees could ‘overwhelm the system’.

THE visa unit of the department predicted that the proposed changes would ‘create massive, massive legal costs to the department and the State’. Let’s just remind ourselves that these were the same proposed changes to the Constitution which Mr O’Gorman insisted would have no such impact at all.

When the media sought these documents before the referendum, they were refused. The website Gript appealed the refusal, and finally received them this week. If all the Government parties, and all the opposition parties bar Aontú, and all the NGOs had had their way, that would have been six weeks after you had voted to make these catastrophic amendments to Bunreacht na hÉireann.

You would have voted Yes/Yes on the basis of Brexit-level, barefaced lies.

And nobody, it seems, will be held accountable for this shocking attempt to dupe the electorate. Nobody will be asked to explain why they tried to walk the country blindfolded into catastrophic consequences, just so they could boast of having purged our backward Constitution of ‘outdated language’.

Nobody will have to answer for totally misrepresenting – and trying their damnedest to bury – the advice they had received about the chaos that would ensue.

If the Government is allowed to get away with this appalling betrayal of public trust, then maybe we are the idiots they took us for after all. We need answers – what almost happened, and why?