This year, Ireland is commemorating the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth. That great poet once remarked waspishly that the Irish had “fed the heart on fantasies/ the heart’s grown brutal from the fare/ more substance in our enmities than in our love.” But on Friday, Ireland took a massive step against enmity and consigned one outmoded version of itself to the past.
Things won’t be the same again.
The referendum saw the Irish become the first national electorate in the world to legalise same-sex marriage. In other countries, marriage equality has come about through acts of parliament or through the courts. Here, significantly, it’s been won at the ballot box, in a move that will have far-reaching ramifications. This full and final welcoming of LGBT people into the Irish family is a homecoming that enhances us all.
The result is hardly a surprise, given that all the major Irish political parties were in support of equality. A broad spectrum of sportspeople, writers, children’s rights activists, artists and other public figures rowed into the campaign. Former president Mary McAleese, a devout Catholic deeply respected by older voters, spoke movingly about the experiences of her son who is gay and stated that she would be voting for equality.
Powerful contributions from acclaimed novelist Colm Tóibín, Irish Times columnist Una Mullally and TV3 political reporter Ursula Halligan proved important testimonies of the discrimination and fear suffered by Irish gay people in the past. A low-key, but steely interview given by the taoiseach, Enda Kenny, to the Sunday Independent last weekend was crucial. “Are we going to say to our own people that they aren’t equal?” Kenny asked, crystallising the debate into one central question.
Meanwhile, the no side helped scupper their chances. Surrogate pregnancy, illegal in Ireland, was dragged into the debate, as was assisted human reproduction and adoption law. A dismal poster campaign featured images of a photogenic young man and woman kissing a baby, with the slogan: “Children deserve a mother and a father”. It later emerged that the couple on the poster had no idea that their picture was being used in this way and were strong proponents of marriage equality.
Another no poster proclaimed: “A mother’s love is irreplaceable”, a contention that will have given pause for thought to the tens of thousands of Irish citizens who had loving stepmothers (as I had) or who are part of the kind of family that doesn’t appear in shampoo ads. Portraying the pro-equality electorate as opponents of motherhood was an unusual and high-risk strategy. Some of us expected a poster with the slogan: “Gays hate apple pie”. Further missteps by the no side helped to seal their defeat. One prominent no campaigner appeared to suggest in a newspaper interview that all unmarried people, gay and straight, should abstain from sex forever. As rallying calls go, it was brave.
In the end, the no campaign failed to persuade the electorate that the referendum was fundamentally about anything other than the right of Irish gay people to be equal in their own country. The Catholic hierarchy’s position was two-track, to say the least. “Offensive language” was not to be used about gay people, the bishops said. At the same time, gay marriage was “a radical departure from human nature”. No offence there, obviously.
Brave priests and nuns came out in favour of a yes vote. But the debate saw the continuing march of the Irish hierarchical church into the swamps of its self-wrought irrelevance, precisely at a time when a strong spiritual voice for social justice was needed.
The political class in Ireland has learned painful lessons from previous referendum defeats, lessons perhaps highlighted by the pollsters getting it so badly wrong about the recent UK general election. As a result, the government’s spin was that the result would be close. A well-managed campaign was matched by a remarkably wide social movement, of the type that hasn’t been seen in Ireland before. Thousands of young Irish emigrants, galvanised by social media, returned to the country to vote. Sixty thousand new voters registered in the last two months.
Our impressive young health minister, Leo Varadkar, himself a gay man (and possibly a future taoiseach), called the result “a kind of revolution”. Certainly, it’s an acknowledgement of social attitudes that have quietly been evolving and maturing in Ireland over the past two decades.
For Irish LGBT people and for those of us with gay family members and loved ones, the victory is an immense relief and a joy. More widely, it has radically altered the dynamic between the gay and straight communities in Ireland; indeed, it has done a lot to dissolve such distinctions.
This is a victory for humane citizenship and societal empathy, an old idea in Ireland, stretching back to our founding revolution, the centenary of which is to be commemorated next year. Indeed, a defeat would have rendered a central phrase in the 1916 proclamation meaningless, the promise to “cherish all the children of the nation equally”.
In a wider sense, the amendment will be seen as an important part of a much larger societal change. This has to do with lamentable political failure, the decline of church power in the wake of the child abuse scandals, the growth of education and mass media, the collapse of discredited certainties. Even the savage economic crash may have played a part. Some of us in Ireland feel that we should be focusing a lot more on what people are doing in their boardrooms rather than in their beds.
But at heart, the vote was intensely personal. The great novelist John McGahern once wrote that Ireland has never been a nation, but a collection of tens of thousands of little republics called families. My sense is that Irish voters flooded to the polls to support their gay daughters and sons, their siblings, neighbours, workmates and friends.
To most of us, it wasn’t a culture war, but a multitude of private solidarities expressed through a vote. One letter writer to an Irish newspaper expressed the matter simply: “I have two adult children. One is allowed to marry, the other is not. How can this be right?”
The decision reveals a country no longer willing to act the part of obedient little Ireland, but increasingly at peace with the diverse society it is, unbothered by anyone else’s images. The country remains far from a liberal utopia – abortion is still illegal in all but the rarest of circumstances. But the campaign was conducted with unusual civility. There was no mud-slinging, very little anger or bitterness. There was even some humour. (YouTube features a clip of one Dublin taxi driver being interviewed on British television. “I’m all in favour of same-sex marriage. I’ve been having the same sex with the wife for the last 30 years.”)
Most voters listened in respectful attentiveness to what the no side had to say and then rejected it out of hand. And hundreds of thousands of Catholic yes voters will be attending mass today, in every constituency up and down the land. They do so in a kinder and fairer country where extraordinary new possibilities have been glimpsed.
It’s been a wonderful, deeply moving moment of liberation and hope, a redefining of Ireland’s attitude towards itself. Never again will a gay Irish teenager be told by her country’s laws that she doesn’t deserve equality. I’m grateful to be a citizen of Ireland today.
Joseph O’Connor’s most recent novel is The Thrill of It All