Twin referenda on a constitution written in the 1930s also address questions over how to define a family.
As the world marks International Women’s Day, Ireland is voting on a pair of referendum questions about how its constitution should refer to the role of women, who is responsible for providing care, and how to define a family.But what at first seemed like a simple decision about updating outdated language in the 1937 constitution has become fraught, and it’s not at all clear which way the country will vote.
Mary McAleese, a former president of Ireland, has said parts of the constitution have “just aged badly.” The “women in the home” clause, she said, was “no longer suited to an Ireland anxious to promote gender equality.”Ireland, once deeply conservative and among the poorest in Western Europe, has emerged as a socially liberal country.
Tomas Finn, a lecturer in history at the University of Galway, said there had been a “desire to remove this language from the constitution for quite a long time, but the question became, what should replace it?”He said the government may have been “more successful to just delete it, because now it’s controversial, or at least there are concerns about the language proposed to replace it.”
“What started out as a straightforward ‘let’s delete this’ has become more complex,” said Gail McElroy, a politics professor at Trinity College Dublin..” The government wants to change the constitution to recognize that families can be founded on relationships other than marriage, such as unmarried parents or a single parent or grandparents.
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