Just three weeks ago the people of Ireland went to the polls to vote in a dual referendum which as it turns out will go down in history. The date – 8 March 2024 –was chosen by the framers of the referendums so that the vote would coincide with International Women’s Day – and the uncomfortable fact that Mothers’ Day fell only two days later must have escaped their attention.
We were asked to enter into our constitution the quite mind boggling notion that the family could be founded on any kind of “durable relationship”, and secondly to delete from the constitution a rather wonderful commitment by the State to recognise and defend the singular role of the woman in the home.
The country’s ruling élite of Ireland was almost unanimous in its support of both referendums: Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Green Party, Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, the Social Democrats and People Before Profit-Solidarity and Civil Society groups, in particular the very handsomely government-funded National Women’s Council of Ireland.
Against this Goliath of political and social power stood a tiny David in the form of Aunt, Independent Ireland, Human Dignity Alliance, Iona Institute, Family Solidarity and Lawyers for No, and Lawyers for No, and I have to admit that I thought poor David was done for. It was only a few days before the vote that I got the impression that it might not be a shoe-in after all (despite one poll even just a week before showing Yes leading No by 43% to 23%).
By the late morning of the day following the vote it was clear that both Amendments had been rejected resoundingly: by the highest and third-highest percentage votes for No in the history of Irish constitutional referendums, and I presume this result must set a kind of world record for defeats registered by such a large and politically powerful bloc.
Many have asked how could a political class so misjudge the thought of not only the electorate at large, but of their own grassroots supporters (especially for Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin whose supporters overwhelmingly voted No). Some of the political leaders would like to put the result down to the obtuseness of the voters – even including their own supporters – and Sinn Féin has already committed itself to giving voters an opportunity to try again. But it is important to see what such a shocking result reveals about the nature of this unified bloc of Irish political and social might.
Even if many in the ruling socio-political bloc are disinclined or unable to explore the implications of their dramatic estrangement from the electorate, I would like to suggest that the vote reveals that this bloc is comprised of a “self-anointed élite” who have deeply absorbed the principle tenets of wokeism.
In his 1996 work The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, the American economist Thomas Sowell has described how “a relatively small group of articulate people” have through the massification of media, politics and government, managed to acquire “great leverage in determining the course taken by a whole society”. Such élites are committed to the same kinds of crusades worldwide, crusades which are all marked by the “moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government.”
Furthermore they are, as he convincingly shows in his work, so committed to these crusades that they are almost impervious to both evidence and arguments against their causes. Even clear statistical evidence which would undermine their crusades (he gives by example failed crusades in the USA against poverty, in favour of “safety”, and to promote safe sex) is ignored by them. And regarding their opponents, those “who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin”.
And certainly one cannot help but think of our dual referendum when Sowell writes that the ruling élites are clearly anti-family, because “… the preservation of the family as an autonomous decision-making unit is incompatible with the third-party decision making that is at the heart of the vision of the anointed.”
In a word, Sowell is saying that such ruling élites are ideologues. They are committed to certain woke ideological causes in the face of the facts, or even – ultimately – in the face of the democratic wishes of the people.
It strikes me that there is only one answer to this situation which is so dangerous for the life of a nation, and that is for ordinary people to get involved in politics. Perhaps this situation has been caused as much by the wokeism of many in the ruling class as by the inertia of many ordinary people. It is perhaps timely to remember the exhortation of Pope St John Paul II that «the lay faithful are never to relinquish their participation in ‘public life’, that is, in the many different economic, social, legislative, administrative and cultural areas, which are intended to promote organically and institutionally the common good». (John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles laici, 42).
If there ever was a moment for a person to become involved at whatever level in Irish political life, it is now.