Middle Ireland is NOT engaged by gay marriage. And all this hectoring is making it worse
As the referendum approaches, a very timely warning...
RECENTLY I had a truncated conversation about gay marriage with an acquaintance here in Co. Clare. This was a young to middleaged professional man, a lawyer, with a superfluity of education under his belt. He was voting against the constitutional amendment, he said, because he believes marriage should be between a man and a woman.
I didn’t pursue the subject after that, and I’ll tell you why. It’s a feature of rural life that you must – as far as possible without surrender – be on good terms with your neighbours.
Finding out that they have fundamentally different views on important social or political issues is not conducive to that. So you change the subject to less significant matters, like the chance of rain. Cowardly maybe, but there it is.
A succession of opinion polls has indicated widespread support for the referendum on same-sex marriage in May.
It’s just as well that there are opinion polls to gauge the public mood like this, because in rural Ireland at least, the most marked characteristic of this referendum is not that hardly anyone – but absolutely no one – is talking about it.
A local campaign group for marriage equality tells me informally that, as yet, they haven’t met with any hostility or opposition from anyone. No resistance to gay marriage? In rural Ireland? Where there are countless people who still think they don’t know anyone who’s gay? It just doesn’t add up.
Since this debate began, it has been characterised by two diametrically opposed camps insulting each other.
On the one side, you’ve got the Catholic bishops, together with their media-loving proxies in the Iona Institute, offending everyone who’s not in that classic 1950s two-up two-down nuclear family.
On the other side, you’ve got the main political parties, burdened by varying degrees of unpopularity and varying numbers of recalcitrant backbenchers, together with assorted gay rights campaigners shouting: ‘Bigot!’ at all comers. So far so unhelpful. In between is a multitude of people ducking their heads under the crossfire, and revealing nothing. In an atmosphere of such antagonism, people are afraid to say what they think for fear of being metaphorically lynched. They’re being nagged, threatened and berated by both sides, so they decide it might be a better idea to keep their opinions a secret until they reach the secure anonymity of the polling booth.
The Government has now pledged to go after this middle ground, dispatching an unobjectionable Everyman-type such as Charlie Flanagan or Simon Coveney into the field.
Fianna Fáil, too, is worried about the result, with former minister Pat Carey observing this week that his party’s campaign lacks urgency. Mr Carey, as he revealed publicly for the first time this week – at the age of 67 – has a personal interest because he is a gay man in a long-term relationship.
BUT the efforts to secure the ‘middle ground’ must be hampered by the fact that nobody seems to know where exactly it is, or who’s in it, or what they think. We have reason to believe, according to last month’s Red C poll, that 46% of people have ‘reservations’ about gay marriage; what those reservations are remains a mystery.
Rural Ireland, it has been decided, is the territory that matters here. And no doubt rural Ireland, as usual, will be assumed to consist of nothing but GAA-playing, Mass-going farmers who left school after the Inter.
However, most people in rural Ireland don’t feel themselves represented by the Iona Institute, and don’t take their instructions from the pulpit, thank you very much.
Equally they have little or no personal experience of the urban LGBT scene in Dublin. And they don’t want to be hectored, by any of these lobbies, when they’re trying to give due consideration to a constitutional matter that they’re being asked to vote on.
So who might speak to that middle ground of people who have ‘reservations’ about gay marriage, such as my lawyer friend? Who might persuade them? Is a politician – even an innocuous one – equal to the task?
As Alan Shatter has pointed out, the Children and Family Relationships Bill, set to be published this coming week, will now unavoidably get in the way of the gay marriage debate, even though they are entirely separate.
The Bill will strengthen legislative support for non-traditional families, including children of same-sex parents and unmarried heterosexual parents, and children living with non-biological parents, among others. For instance, while single gay people can already apply to adopt a child, the new measures will allow them to adopt as couples. In fact, from the point of view of those who want to have a debate that’s All About the Children, the referendum is almost an irrelevance by comparison.
That Bill addresses most of the remaining legal disparities between civil partnership and marriage. Once enacted, the difference between civil partnership and marriage will be negligible. And then, perhaps, it will become clear just how small this matter is, legally speaking, that we’re being asked to vote on.
AFTER all, both Yes and No campaigns do have one important thing in common; both sides seem to swoon at the very word ‘marriage’, and believe the institution is the ultimate in desirable social ideals, while in that vast, well-trodden and oft-mentioned middle ground stand the rest of us, who believe nothing of the kind.
There’s said to be a lot of what’s called ‘soft’ support for the same-sex marriage amendment, which may mean there’s a lot of ‘soft’ opposition to it as well. These are people who might be won over if they’re not distracted from the substantive issue by the No side, and if they’re not driven into hiding by furious invective from the Yes side.
But how can you communicate with people who won’t disclose what they’re thinking? The noble practice of listening to the other fellah’s point of view is not only unfashionable at the moment, it has also become impracticable, as the other fellah has now become afraid to tell you what his view is.
And so in that sense, the high-minded campaign to banish prejudice has been a success of sorts: prejudice has now become invisible. At least until polling day.