I didn’t leave Fine Gael, it left me – the establishment has fallen into the abyss
Iwas shouting on the telly on Monday night. Could you blame me? I was sick listening to men explaining why we should vote No in the referendums. While RTÉ created Michael McDowell The Musical, women rang me up and asked: “Am I going mad?” No one seemed to notice we were being asked to delete motherhood from the Constitution.
Sure, the existing wording was archaic. The German constitution says: “Every mother shall be entitled to the protection and care of the community.” We weren’t offered that.
We were asked to exclude mothers in the name of inclusion. No wonder we thought we were losing it.
Well, we didn’t lose. The “mother in the home” referendum was defeated by 75pc of voters, far higher than the widely ridiculed “durable relationship” amendment. Voters had different reasons for voting No, and the sop being offered to carers was a major issue.
But throughout the campaign, the motherhood aspect was largely ignored.
I finally did lose it on Saturday when all I saw was men claiming victory for the No vote while Maria Steen, who took on the Tánaiste and won, was ignored by RTÉ TV and Virgin Media. I texted the producer of Virgin Media’s Tonight Show and asked to go on because no one was representing, or being allowed to represent, the case for mothers.
On Saturday, a man told me he went to the polling station intending to vote Yes. Then he remembered his mother, who had 11 children, one of whom died.
“She got nothing from the State; not even a PRSI number. A line in the Constitution was all she had, so I said No,” he said.
I was raging as the political analysis focused on allegations the liberal electorate that voted for same-sex marriage was now a right-wing, misinformed, confused mob who might have done the right thing had a lazy cabinet communicated with them better.
My angry analysis on behalf of mothers has been viewed about 450,000 times. Yet presenter Ciara Doherty tried to frame my point as a conservative backlash.
Why is it conservative to acknowledge that mothers exist and we contribute to the common good? Ask any economist what a country looks like if women stop having children.
I got a huge reaction, but despite the fact everyone knows I’m a Blueshirt Princess, I only heard from one Fine Gael TD. That was Charlie Flanagan, who warned Fine Gael as far back as 2018 that the referendum would be trouble. Charlie gets it, yet he’s been isolated within Fine Gael and isn’t running again.
Paschal Donohoe told The Business Post the No vote would have limited impact on the Government. Well, I’m done being taken for granted.
I have defended Fine Gael in everything from water rates to closing A&Es. I stood up for Enda Kenny when he was subjected to relentless sneering from the rest of the media. I haven’t left Fine Gael, but Fine Gael left me the day Helen McEntee walked down Store Street surrounded by gardaí, claiming Dublin was safe.
I’ve stood at a bus stop on Aston Quay at night, crying, because the 115 to Mullingar was 45 minutes late, wouldn’t guarantee me a seat even though I’d booked a ticket and three taxis refused to go to Enfield.
I was afraid of the addicts and drunks. What did McEntee know about safety in Dublin?
I’ll happily include lone parents, carers, unmarried fathers and men who hoover in the Constitution – but not at the expense of mothers. That doesn’t make me far-right.
I’ve argued for the nationalisation of private hospitals, the abolition of school patronage so that all children go to the same school and for public housing over the payment of rent supplement.
I’ve excoriated turf-cutters, advocated car sharing, condemned antisemitism and repeatedly defended our obligations to refugees.
I praised the male foreign doctors who treated me in hospital recently, yet the Government passed the Irish Language Act, which preserves 20pc of all public service jobs – including the health service – for Irish speakers, a policy I regard as nativist and, frankly, racist.
Meanwhile, progressives like Aodhán Ó
Ríordáin oppose housing developments in their constituencies.
I’ve never objected to any housing, because I think other people are entitled to a house; the housing crisis is the original sin from which most other problems flow downstream. The immigration problem isn’t a race problem – it’s a housing problem.
Yet I feel the frosty silence from the rightthinkers who disapprove of the common cause they think I’ve made with the right-wing.
I haven’t found common cause with anyone except other women who are not represented by the National Women’s Council of Ireland, which backed the proposals to delete mothers from the Constitution.
The far right has not broken through. The centre has not fallen. It is the political establishment that has fallen into the abyss.
Germaine Greer called her seminal book
The Female Eunuch because she argued that women’s sexuality and femaleness were crushed by the consumerist bourgeois nuclear family.
She urged women to look at their vaginas and taste their menstrual blood. I am not a female eunuch. I will not be de-gendered.
I have a womb that grew three babies and I have breasts that made milk to feed them. I am a miracle of nature. I am a mother. I am woman. Hear me roar.
‘I was raging as the political analysis focused on allegations the liberal electorate that voted for same-sex marriage was now a right-wing, misinformed, confused mob... Yet Ciara Doherty tried to frame my point as a conservative backlash’