LONDON — An attempt by Ireland’s capitalist rulers to impose their values on working people blew up in their faces March 8 when two constitutional amendments, backed by the country’s main capitalist parties, were soundly defeated by large margins in a referendum.
Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who claimed the changes were needed to get rid of “old fashioned language about women in the home,” resigned March 20 after the defeat.
On one level the proposed changes sought to reflect widely held views about the family today. One amendment sought to expand the definition of families from those based on marriage to include “other durable relationships.”
The second amendment would have eliminated the references to “woman,” “women” and “mothers” in sections of the Constitution. It deleted the role of women and mothers in “the home” that “gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” It would also have deleted a section requiring the state “to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”
A new article was to have read, “The State recognizes 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.”
The Irish Constitution was adopted in 1937 and reflected the views of the capitalist class at the time and the dominance of the Catholic Church. Since then millions of women have entered the workforce, gained greater economic independence, and attitudes among women and men have been transformed, strengthening the working class. In 1995 divorce was legalized and in 2018 a ban on abortion was lifted.
The attempt to remove the words “women” and “mothers,” however, has another purpose. It is aimed at blurring over the fact that there are two sexes, men and women. That view is in line with unscientific notions pushed by meritocratic middle-class layers that the terms “men” and “women” are somehow regressive. These views are rampant in liberal circles today.
Moreover, the campaign for the amendments covered over the actual conditions that exist for workers under capitalism. Care for the young, elderly and sick does fall disproportionately on women, and the proposed changes did nothing to address this class reality.
The amendments were not aimed at advancing the fight for women’s rights, leaving untouched the impact today’s sharpening crisis has on workers in Ireland, as in the rest of the capitalist world. The lack of affordable housing, child care and health care, along with the employers’ assaults on wages and conditions, makes it ever harder for women and all workers to raise a family.
Rents and mortgages have risen so much that half a million 18 to 34 year olds in the Republic of Ireland — out of a total population of just over 5 million — still live with their parents.
For workers with children, infant and child care fees are “crippling,” according to state TV broadcaster RTE. Hospitals are dangerously overcrowded, a report by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation said last year, with large numbers of patients admitted without a bed. Hundreds of medical procedures are being cancelled daily.
“We kept mná [Irish for women] in the law,” reads a celebratory banner in a photo posted online by Women’s Space Ireland after the amendments’ defeat.
In addition to the many working-class women and men who are all too familiar with the real challenges facing their families today, the Catholic Church also opposed the amendments.
The Irish Constitution, like all bourgeois constitutions, codifies how the capitalist rulers exercise their class dictatorship. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which contains free speech and other rights won in revolutionary struggles, the Irish Constitution doesn’t. These protections from the rulers’ state serve workers’ interests far better than “progressive” proclamations with no protection from state interference.
“The fight for women’s rights is inseparable from efforts to build the labor movement,” Pamela Holmes, the Communist League parliamentary candidate for Tottenham in the U.K.’s upcoming general election, told the Militant. Her campaign calls for the end of British rule in Northern Ireland and for Ireland’s unification. She pointed to the number of trade union fights and union-organizing efforts in both Northern Ireland and the Republic in the south, and in the U.K.
“It will be workers, female and male, acting independently of the bosses who will be key to the struggle for women’s rights,” Holmes said. “Advancing that struggle requires a union-led fight for jobs with wages and conditions that are necessary for families to live rather than get torn apart. The CL calls for a government-funded program of public works, to provide jobs at union-scale wages, to build the things working people need: housing, child care centers, hospitals and more.”