Irish voters have refused to erase the family

It’s not been a particularly good weekend for the political establishment in Ireland. Two constitutional changes have been rejected by the electorate, despite being backed by all the mainstream parties – Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour, Greens, Sinn Fein – plus the usual pundits and something called the National Women’s Council (a quango which is meant to represent women but somehow doesn’t). The state broadcaster, RTE, which finds itself in a similar position to the BBC after the Brexit vote, is curiously subdued about the outcome.

Voters were given the option to, as the Guardian put it, ‘modernise the Irish constitution’ in line with the referendums of 2015 and 2018 which approved same sex marriage and abortion and ‘underscored Ireland’s secular, liberal transformation’, and said no, thanks all the same. 

The clauses under review, very characteristic of Eamon De Valera’s 1937 constitution and described by the government as ‘outdated’, declared that ‘the state recognises the family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent to and superior to all positive law’ and ‘the state pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of marriage, on which the family is founded, and to protect it against attack.’