Irish voters reject constitutional referendums on women and the family

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Irish voters have roundly rejected a government bid to change the country’s constitution in two areas relating to women and families.

Two referendums on Friday had proposed recognising families based on “durable relationships”, not just marriage, and scrapping references to a woman’s “life within the home” by including other family members among caregivers. 

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said on Saturday both proposals had been rejected.

“I think it’s clear at this stage that the family amendment and the care amendment referendums have been defeated — defeated comprehensively on a respectable turnout,” he told reporters.

“It was our responsibility to convince the majority of people to vote ‘yes’ and we clearly failed to do so,” he said following Friday’s vote, which came ahead of local and European elections in June and a general election due within a year.

To have lost “this badly” meant many people had “got this wrong and I’m certainly one of them”, Varadkar said, adding the government would fully respect the outcome of the vote.

Varadkar had said before the vote that defeat would be a “setback”. Ireland prides itself on its progressive reputation and has overhauled its constitution in recent years to permit divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage.

Official results were still trickling in and full results were not expected until Saturday evening. But all indications from early in the count were that voters had rejected both amendments and by mid-afternoon the leaders of all three parties that make up the ruling coalition parties admitted defeat.

On one ballot paper in the southern county of Wexford, a voter had written “language too vague, please try again” instead of marking “yes” or “no”, broadcaster RTÉ reported.

Varadkar had called Friday’s votes a “value statement about what we stand for” and a chance to delete “some very old-fashioned, very sexist language” from the 1937 constitution.

Opposition to the care amendment focused not on the state’s obligation “to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”, which critics said did not reflect modern Ireland. Instead, they rejected the narrowness of the proposed new definition of caregivers, which would have excluded non-family members.

Tom Clonan, an independent senator whose son has a neuromuscular disease and uses a wheelchair, said he was relieved that wording that was “toxic to the rights of disabled citizens and carers” had been defeated.

The government “didn’t convince”, said Mary Lou McDonald, leader of opposition party Sinn Féin that opinion polls show is the most popular in Ireland and which backed a “yes/yes” vote. “It was their job to get it over the line.”

She said the government had “failed to listen” when it rejected wording proposed by a citizen’s assembly and a parliamentary committee to recognise care both within and outside the home.

Marie Sherlock, a senator for the opposition Labour party, called it a “sad day for those who have been trying for many decades to get . . . sexist language out of the constitution”.