Referendums: Yes votes will see ‘new realities’ put into dated parts of Constitution, McAleese says

Former president Mary McAleese has called for Yes votes in the referendums on care and family taking place next Friday. She said the proposals offer a chance to “insert new realities, new energy and new insights” into parts of the Constitution that have aged badly.

In the referendums taking place on March 8th, the Government proposes expanding the constitutional definition of family to recognise “durable relationships”, such as cohabiting couples and their children, and to replace the language around “women in the home” with language recognising care within families.

Ms McAleese said leaving the two articles as they are would “in my view contradict the dynamic of a people who cared enough to vote overwhelmingly for same sex marriage, who cared enough to ensure that the tragedies of Savita Halappanavar’s death and the death of her unborn child would not be in vain”.

In a keynote address an event in Dublin on Friday hosted by Treoir and One Family, who are seeking Yes votes in the referendums, Ms McAleese said: “Each of those referendums, in 2015 and 2018 respectively, provoked intense debate, involved considerable weighing up of complex arguments and saw our citizens take firm responsibility for necessary constitutional change.”

She said the upcoming votes should not been seen any differently, adding: “I hope between us we not only will change the wording but will then stay with the issues that have been raised including by those who would wish the wording to go further.”

Ms McAleese described the referendums “as the latest step of many on the road to the ‘farther shore’ of full equality, full inclusion which will be easier to reach from a Yes-Yes on March 8th.”

The proposals being voted on were “part of a journey” and “not a destination”, she went on.

The former president said Yes votes would “remove from the Constitution language and attitudes which have long been controversial on account of perceived sexism and the marginalisation of many people whose strong contribution to family and community life has been under-valued”.

The endorsement of the family proposal would, she said, mean that “so many families whose lived lives enhance our communities and our country but are not based on marriage will see in our revised Constitution the respect they have always deserved and the recognition they have earned, but which is absent, deliberately absent, from the Constitution as currently worded”.

The “so-called Carers Amendment” was, she said, “an exciting development with considerable future potential, for it sees our families as what they are and always have been – essential communities of mutual care for one another, and it tells families that they are not alone for Government has a constitutional responsibility to strive to support them in caring for one another”.

Where the care referendum was concerned, Ms McAleese said she believed “a resounding Yes vote will place a new spotlight on that world of family care and involve us in a much more dynamic debate underpinned by this fresh constitutional recognition, which is as much a challenge as it is a statement of intent”.

She said polling day offered a “chance to insert new realities, new energy and new insights into parts of our Constitution that have aged badly and are no longer fit for purpose”.

“There is no value in holding on to them for the sake of nostalgia or out of some mistaken notion that the Constitution should be inviolable,” she said.

Other speakers at the event included John O’Meara, who recently won a Supreme Court case for the widow’s pension following the death of his long-time partner and mother of his children; Deirdre McCarthy, a social worker from Cork who was a teenage parent and is a now family carer; and Maxine Walshe, a psychotherapist and carer.;