Marriage and Motherhood are Above the State : Vote No/No on the 8th of March.

Well, it’s referendum time again in Ireland and that means the government, along with a string of non-NGO quangos such as the National Women’s Council (NWC) who depend on them for funding, are trotting out the “Yes/Yes” for both of the proposed deletions/amendments to our constitution. The government want to you vote a certain way, many of the organs of the state pretend that it’s a neutral, impartial sober exercise in Democratic realpolitik, when, in reality there is some desperate agenda being rammed through, probably related to some supreme court cases which might entail the government having to divert funds away from, I don’t know a 20 million Euro virtue-signalling symbolic exercise in feminist triumphalism referendum such as this, and provide some well-needed benefits to poor mothers. It’s strange that a government (or most of the current government) which campaigned vigorously to have marriage redefined now want to practically obliterate its significance from the constitution and put it on the same level as a ‘durable relationship’ (as proposed by the first part of the referendum). Well durable might mean long-lasting or it might simply mean strong. I can foresee the lawyer’s arguing their respective cases in a the bonanza that is sure to follow. Another lamentable aspect of all of this is that, there are many undecided voters out there. As if there was really an intellectual case on both sides, as if the government weren’t trying to play us for fools with their empty slogans.

Our constitution, as it stands, and well it should, recognises the immeasurable good mothers do for the common good and recognises marriage as the basic cell of society. But the second part of the referendum wants to erase the word ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ from the constitution, on so-called International Women’s Day, two days from Mothers’ Day.  The Irish constitution (in article 41) recognises the necessity of the job of a full time care in the family. It says that the State “shall endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties at home”. An obvious reference to fathers striving to bring home the bacon would have made sense, and the State could then “ensure” that they are not unfairly taxing the family unit as if they were one individual with the upper-tax rate kicking in at 42,000 (as they do today). Maybe then the State (or the Welfare state) could reduce its role of daddy to so many unmarred mothers, making more daddies take the responsibility that is their duty.  The National Women’s council position makes no sense. Writing in one of a number of Irish Times articles on the subject recently, Orla O’ Connor said : “A Yes vote will recognise the contribution that our unpaid labour makes to the economy and society”. Well, since the referendum proposes to delete the text “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”, it means a Yes vote would do the exact opposite of what Ms. O’ Connor indicates. Not only did Michael McDowell demonstrate that there are no negative legal implications of the constitutional articles as they currently are written, he indicated that the Murphy case in 1980 specifically invoked article 41 so as to invalidate a law unfairly burdening a married couple with a higher tax liability than two individuals. Interestingly, article 41 also allowed the granting of welfare entitlements to a widower with three children in the ruling of the recent O’ Meara case. There is no reason to think that it prohibits recognition of different family and home caring arrangements and contexts. 

However, through former finance minister Charlie McGreevey’s tax individualisation of the year 2000, the State has come down hard once again on the married couple with one earner. If a couple earns €60,000 via a single income in 2024, they would be €2,355 worse-off tax-wise than if that income was spread across two earners. The extra income tax credit you gain as a two earning household (€1,875) nearly matches the home-carer’s credit (€1,800) that would be lost in this scenario. Even getting dental benefits for a stay-at-home mother is difficult because of insifficient PRSI contributions, again because the State doesn’t recognise that work as a full-time job. The tax burdens on families are making motherhood and stay-at-home care something more like a luxury rather than a necessity. What is even more galling about all of this is the State’s apparent disregard of the role of full-time parental care work at home, most-often carried out by the mother, a job which a recent study from the insurance provider Royal London has valued at €54,000 per annum. The monetary value of this figure becomes obvious when you consider the steep cost of childcare and associated diverse work involved in running a household. The extra tax revenue that would come from such an extra ‘income’ on top of the €60,000 would be €12,000, so why can this not be put back to families as a tax credit ? The answer is probably that the State would have less control and politicians would be seen to have less to do, and the electorate would have fewer reasons to elect the kind of politician that increasingly nudges against or shoves aside the natural institutions and relationships by which we are, to a large extent, self-governing. This is why I am strongly against the changes proposed in the forthcoming referenda on the 8th of March. No woman is ever prevented from anything in modern Ireland because of anything in Article 41, but many women are prevented from minding their own children at home in spite of it. In fact, you could go as far as to say, that since the child benefit payment that mothers get the length and breadth of the country, having presumably been brought in under the pretext of the constitutional protection of motherhood, could now be rescinded. Indeed, the proposed amendments doing away with motherhood and that role of woman, will confer no new rights on anyone. It will only remove them.

The more families stick together and get on with the hard work of raising families, the less there is for the State to do. We are now in the absurd situation whereby the mother who stays at home to mind the children is penalised financially, while there are endless schemes, funding and tax credits available if you send the children into professional child care (done almost entirely by women too, so I fail to see how this advances a feminist cause). Setting aside the tax advantage for the government in the latter scenario, the control the family cedes to the government is not to be taken lightly – the ebb of this control is hard to claw back. What the State gives, the State can take away. Article 41 is a bulwark against this. When family is weak, the State steps in. 

All-in-all, we know how the State wants us all to vote. They always frame the question such that the answer they want is a “Yes”. With setting the referendum day on International Women’s Day, they want us to associate the erasure of motherhood from the constitution with freedom, with liberation and the casting-off of the shackles of a patriarchal, 1930s, conservative, Catholic Ireland, another falling domino in the wake of liberal progressive, modern Ireland. But constitutions have a purpose, they are meant to be supplemented, enhanced, amended, but not destroyed. They have a purpose, they often merely recognise what is good, that which should not be torn down. The constitution limits what politicians and law-makers can do. There are some things you don’t mess with. Whatever about apple pie, motherhood and the natural ties of family relationships can never be held to judicial ransom at the behest, for example, of what the government defines to be a “durable relationship” (this term is to be inserted as an equivalent to marriage in the proposed changes to Article 41.1.1). We really need to know what is meant by this term “durable relationship” because, under the new text, it is going to be cast as the “natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law” – so any sort of grouping at all that calls itself a “durable relationship” inherits these attributes de facto ? The framers of these referenda may think that they are widening definitions, to account for the variegated households of today’s Ireland, but in reality they are removing definitions. It’s as if, in the name of flexibility, they want to lower the sides of a bucket to the base, to be more “open”, they are just erasing and removing the recognition and protection of the family unit. Motherhood, marriage, and family are natural institutions which predate all positive law, and the State should defer to these and not define and over-rule them, as it would be doing in removing the connection between marriage and family in the proposed changes to Article 41.3.1. Yes, marriages break down and sometimes households take different forms, but we should not lose sight of that which society should aspire to. Many who want to change the constitution speak of it as a “living document”. It is only living in so far as we heed its contents, not seek to delete or drastically overhaul them. Perhaps behind all of the talk by progressives  around the constitution as a living document is the intent to portray it as living, so that they can then set about killing it.  I would urge all, on the 8th of March, to vote for motherhood and family, vote No to big government. Unjust laws that are against the family unit have at times been rightly ruled, as in the Murphy case,  to be un-constitutional. Deleting from the constitution is even more unconstitutional.