OPINION: Interpreting the referendum results

I DID not pay much attention to the debate during the run-up to the recent referendum. It was not because of any lack of interest on my part. Heavy involvement in a different campaign meant that I didn’t pick up on the hidden agenda that lay behind the wording of the referendum articles by the government. My lapse was inexcusable.

So, caught up in my own preoccupations, I returned from the Mayo Association function in Dublin in time to vote at Murrisk National School. In voting yes to both propositions, I had a vague sense that I was supporting Ireland’s continuing journey from a rigid, coercive and patriarchal society to a more open, tolerant and equal society. This seemed the right thing to do, but as I said, I had not been paying attention to the evolving debate.

The following afternoon, when the referendum result was declared, I was shocked. Was Ireland lurching back to the bad old days and unwinding the progress towards greater tolerance? I felt like I had on November 8, 2016, when I stayed up all night to watch the US Presidential election count on CNN. As dawn broke, I was faced with the realisation that Donald Trump was the new president of the US. I was in Dublin that day and went for a long early morning walk out to the Poolbeg lighthouse to clear my head, in a state of disbelief and fearful of the consequences. I had not seen that result coming. Nor, unfortunately, had the Democratic contender, Hilary Clinton.

This time, I did not go for a walk. Instead, I looked closely for the first time at the issues that had been trashed out during the debate. This is completely the wrong way to go about deciding how to vote, but I still wanted to understand what had gone wrong, as I thought.

The first thing I did was look at the results for all of the constituencies to see if this was an urban v rural issue. Had the people of Mayo and the Northwest Region been sidelined yet again? Not the case! There was not a single constituency where both referendum propositions got a majority yes vote. Indeed, there was only one constituency where one of the two propositions obtained a tiny majority ‘yes’ vote, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown. Probably they are people like me who had not been paying attention to the issues. Elsewhere, it was a county-wide wipeout.

Was it a victory of the extreme right? A Trump-like victory for people who burn down refugee centres? My belated examination of how the referendum had been debated dispelled that notion.

Far from abandoning the path of tolerance and openness, the Irish people had seen through the hollowness of the proposed changes and the fact that they were drafted in a way that offered minimal protection to carers and threatened legal chaos.

What cheered me up was that my failure to pay attention was perhaps less culpable than the failure of policymakers to read the public mood and heed the wise advice of the Citizens’ Assembly when the two propositions were being selected and finalised.

Not only were the parties in the coalition government out of touch with the electorate, but the main opposition party, Sinn Féin, appears also to have been out of touch. Just as well that the people had a better grasp of what a modern, caring and tolerant country needed than the policymakers did.

A very disturbing explanation of the referendum result was given in an article in this week’s New Statesman by Irish Times journalist Finn McRedmond. Irish journalists are often asked to write for prestigious foreign media and the message they convey can sometimes be quite misleading.

McRedmond portrayed post-referendum Ireland as follows:

“Amid riots, embarrassing referendums and a looming general election, there is a growing sense that the energy that once filled Dublin Castle’s courtyard with revellers in 2018 has metastasised into something darker.”

And what is that ‘darker’ Ireland? McRedmond writes:

“There are now two Irelands. One is represented by the politicians who emphasise Ireland’s commitment to diversity, who remind the world that St Patrick was an immigrant; and the other by anti-refugee protesters in Dublin’s East Wall area, arson attacks on proposed asylum centres and upturned trams in the capital’s centre.”

This is an extraordinarily false portrait of Irish society. In America under Trump, you had an activist government of extreme views that was determined to dismantle constitutional protections and reverse the progressive laws that made modern democracies more tolerable than in the past. In Ireland, we appear to have an indolent government that lost touch with the evolving progressive values of our society. A government of the centre-right that is happy to minimise social protection of the weak in an effort to avoid financial commitments.

The Irish electorate as a whole should take a bow. It saw through that hypocrisy and injustice and I did not. I have often called the people of Mayo and the Northwest Region to action in this column, saying that they should be demanding much more from their elected representatives. It seems that they did so on this occasion, and I wasn’t even with them!

John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.