Late on Friday Steyn's lawyers filed three new motions in the District of Columbia Superior Court. You can read them in full here. If you would like to support Mark's attempt to reverse this assault on the First Amendment, see below.
~There is not a lot of good news around as western civilisation floors it off the cliff. The last such in the anglosphere came last autumn, with the Australian people's coast-to-coast rejection of the proposed "Indigenous Voice to Parliament". In the face of suffocating universal support for the yes side from the political, legal, cultural and media establishments, Oz voted it down 60-40.
Well, this weekend the Irish just upped the Aussies, and rejected overwhelmingly two constitutional amendments designed to advance the country's progress upon what the Taoiseach calls "the pathway of liberalism". As in Australia, everybody who matters was in favour of both proposals: all the governing parties - Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Greens; all the more or less viable opposition parties - Sinn Féin, Labour, the Social Democrats; all the media except our friends at Gript; and all the taxpayer-funded NGOs bar two. Every opinion poll this last month indicated that both amendments would pass - Ipsos for my old paper The Irish Times back in February: Yes 60 per cent; no 12 per cent.
Instead, the margin of rejection was even bigger than Down Under. The first amendment was defeated 68-32, and the second 74-26. The latter is the biggest ever failure of an Irish constitutional referendum, and the former the third-biggest. The first amendment lost everywhere except for a narrow win of 50.3 per cent (or 255 votes) in Dún Laoghaire - Gateway to Wales, as my childhood self still thinks of it, just south-east of Dublin city centre. On the second amendment, rejection was total: even the decadent burghers of Dún Laoghaire wouldn't go for it.
For persons of a non-Irish persuasion, I should perhaps say a word about the country's constitution. The first version from 1922 was that of any old British Dominion, tracking very closely the Canadian constitution (the 1867 British North America Act) but with a few local flourishes as permitted by the Lord Chief Justice of England, Viscount Hewart (whom I had cause to cite, very successfully, in the DC Superior Court when Michael E Mann's lawyers attempted to get Phelim McAleer thrown out for having the impertinence to ask them questions as they left the courthouse).
Anyway, the 1922 constitution was not universally popular: it led to civil war. A decade later, when the leader of the losing side, Éamon de Valera, won the general election, he determined to exact his revenge on that document. He disliked not only certain specifics - the oath, the treaty ports - but more broadly what he regarded as its excessively British character. So he set about Irishing it up. For example:
The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law...
The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.
Also:
In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved...
The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.
Lord Chief Justice Hewart would never have entertained for a moment either of the above as constitutional provisions: The whiff of Popery is too obvious. But they certainly reflected the general disposition of the Irish citizenry in the 1930s.
Nine decades later, Leo Varadkar, the Hindu homosexual who now serves as Dev's successor, can perhaps be forgiven for assuming that such sentiments were "outdated" in an Ireland that voted to legalise both abortion and gay marriage. So his ministry proposed to replace both of the above with the following. First:
The State recognises the Family, whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships, as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law...
The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage and to protect it against attack.
And then:
The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.
These would not seem, by the mores of the time, especially controversial. You might be sufficiently squaresville to be married to a person of the opposite sex, but all around you are friends and neighbours enjoying more bespoke relationships: the nice gay couple at Number 27 Wolfe Tone Gardens who co-mingled their sperm and shipped the beaker to a Fallopian timeshare in California; the MtF and FtM at Number 25, whose fabulously hirsute "pregnant man" just dropped his latest set of twins. Surely, these are all "durable relationships" "by reason of the bonds that exist among them".
And yet the assumed obsolescence of "mothers" and thus their necessary elimination from the Irish constitution seemed to unsettle large numbers of the citizenry. In de Valera's day, the Irish - or at any rate their Tin Pan Alley cousins in his home town - were famously partial to mothers: "Mother Machree", "Did Your Mother Come from Ireland?", "That Old Irish Mother of Mine", etc. And even a century on, in an Erin otherwise wholly transformed, they balked at booting that old Irish mother into the same trashcan of history as the Lord Lieutenant and the treaty ports. In no constituency could the Yes vote muster more than 42 per cent (Dún Laoghaire, of course). Our friend Laura Perrins at the indispensable Conservative Woman:
I never thought I'd be so proud of Ireland and the voters. Leading up to this vote I was convinced that they would vote through the ludicrous and confusing changes to the Constitution that deleted mothers and women from it while downgrading marriage. I thought, if mothers voted for this, they will literally vote for anything.
Thankfully, the Irish voters came back with a resounding drop dead to the Irish government. Thankfully, the government cannot just stick the words Modern Ireland on to any old rubbish of a proposal and expect the voters to nod it through like good little lemmings.
In our comments section, Steyn Clubber Denyse O'Leary makes a couple of additional points:
1. The media had no idea it would be a massive defeat. A razor-thin defeat, yes, that can be a tough call. But not this. In other words, the media are completely out of touch and not worth listening to. Any public funding should be yanked.
2. There was something totalitarian about Minister Roderic O'Gorman's post-defeat whining that he was "extremely disappointed"? Look, he asked a question and he got an answer. If he didn't know what the Irish were thinking, well, now he does. If he'd had his wits about him, he would have seen this coming and headed it off by not holding an internationally visible referendum.
There might, after all, be a sneaky way of making Irish women disappear. Doubtless, the government there will try that next. But by now, every one who values her own well-being can at least be on guard for it.
The media are "not worth listening to"? No: you're not worth listening to. In the fashionable quartiers, the Irish Times guys listen to the RTÉ guys and the RTÉ guys listen to the Irish Times guys, and that's as wide a circle of acquaintanceship as either of them needs. As for the "extreme disappointment" of Mr O'Gorman (a gay Green), well, look: the grunting knuckle-dragging troglodytes gave the wrong answer; how do you expect the poor chap to feel?
To reprise my old line, we are moving into the post-democratic age, and the media-political class's contempt for the voice of the people gets ever more brazen. The BBC thinks the masses were too "confused" to vote the right way. Politico assures us that the people rejected the amendments because they were "too weak and open to messy court fights". As for the Dublin media, they're already moving on ...to the Oscars, Gaza, the Princess of Wales's photoshopping skills, more Gaza, more business as usual:
Funding issues facing Black Irish artists highlighted
Pace Politico, I doubt 84 per cent of Donegal voters rejected the "mother in the home" amendment because it was insufficiently LGBTQWERTY. What else might be on the minds of the masses?
Journalist Alison O'Connor says she was "speaking to someone very senior in Fine Gael" who said that a "far-right element" are having a "lot of traction" in "certain communities" like inner city Dublin, and that this may have contributed to the #Referendum2024 'No'/'No' result. pic.twitter.com/5AGZq345ub
— Ben Scallan 🇮🇪 (@Ben_Scallan) March 10, 2024
I would be surprised if a "far-right element" could pull off anything like a landslide this size. Still, since Miss O'Connor brought it up, Ireland is certainly accelerating way beyond anything recognisably Irish to de Valera's generation. In a country of five million, over twenty per cent are foreign born. In Ballyhaunis, County Mayo, home of the state's first purpose-built mosque, that number rises to forty-five per cent - which is more than the town's ethnic Irish population. That's Ireland's future - and it makes no difference whether you vote Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or Sinn Féin, because they're all in favour of it. Tough if you're young (or early-middle-aged) and you'd like to get yourself a one-room flat. North of the border, the Shinners still pretend it's all Republicans vs Unionists; down south, the party's moved on, and the only "Irish Question" of mid-century will be Sunni vs Shia.
You can't posit any of the above in The Irish Times or any other mainstream outlet - and soon, under the new "hate speech" law, you won't be able to email a chum about it or stick a Post-It note on your fridge. The nationalist exertions of a century ago have been entirely wasted.
The "far-right element" willing to go along with that thesis explicitly is small in number. But it is not unreasonable to suggest that there is a far greater percentage of Irish voters feeling vaguely discombobulated by the way so much is changing so fast. A lot of them were in favour of abortion and all the rest, but the State's invitation to formalise the New Ireland and enshrine it in the constitution in place of the Old rattled them.
It remains to be seen whether this is a mere spasm - or the start of a real, sustained pushback. Still, even if only the former, it was hugely enjoyable to see the podium for the victory party being hastily dismantled in the courtyard of Dublin Castle, and the grounds closed to anybody but tourists, lest some vulgar No-No types intrude upon the scene. What was Hillaire Belloc's advice?
Always keep a hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
Voters have apparently concluded:
Always keep a hold of Mother
As you're turned into something other.
~Notwithstanding the verdict in the District of Columbia Superior Court, Steyn's first and second Statements of Claim against the UK media censor Ofcom have been accepted for judicial review by the High Court of England. The King's Bench Division will hear the case in June. Many readers have inquired about how to support Mark's suit, this time over Ofcom's throttling of honest discussion of the Covid and the vaccines. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of Mark's latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell).
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, with the last, a significant chunk thereof. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with a special edition of The Mark Steyn Show featuring Mark and Michele Bachmann in conversation on the US elections. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date opted for Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, and on Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week presented the anthem of a lost Hollywood. Our marquee presentation was the filing of three brand new motions in the DC Superior Court! You can read them in full here.
If you were too busy spending the weekend apologising for disrespecting the undocumented murderer down the street, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
