Ireland's enduring relationship with the referendum

Jun 10, 2008, 11:32 GMT

Dublin - Ireland enjoys a good referendum. Since 1937 the Irish have had their say 27 times on issues ranging from the death penalty, divorce, abortion, and, less controversially, constituency boundaries, votes for non-citizens, local government recognition and changes in voting age.

Not to mention the treaties of the European Union.

It might be assumed given the arid, dry legalese surrounding constitutional amendments, that referendums are dull affairs. Not so. Ireland's referendum campaigns have traditionally been accompanied by much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The debates tend to become particularly vitriolic when the country's Catholic family values are perceived to be under attack as was the case with the divorce and abortion amendments.

In a country where abortion has always been illegal, the population voted between 1983 and 2002 on five potential amendments to the constitution to resolve escalating disputes over semantics in the interpretation of the constitution.

Abortion opponents feared that the constitutional rights of privacy accorded to spouses in marital affairs could be broadened to include the right to abortion.

The Pro-Life Amendment Campaign thought the Supreme Court might take its lead from the controversial ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Roe versus Wade in 1973.

It must be remembered that in pre-boom Ireland, people had a lot of time on their hands.

The campaign lobbied all the major political parties and eventually got their day at the polling booth.

The resultant Eight Amendment to the Constitution in 1983 set in motion a chain of events which eventually resulted in the absurd situation where the population of a country, in which there was no provision for abortion, found themselves voting on whether the threat of suicide should be removed as grounds for the termination of pregnancy.

Not to mention being asked to vote on whether a woman should be allowed to travel abroad for an abortion.

The debate surrounding the various abortion amendments was protracted and lively, to say the least, with some participants affording scant rights to those already born.

Equally bitter were the divorce referenda. The question was first put to the country in 1986 when it was defeated. It was passed in 1995, but not without much wringing of hands.

The divorce debate combined with the various abortion referenda of the 80s and 90s with the EU thrown in for good measure gave the impression that there was a whole lot of polling going on.

However, if the government had been thinking of slipping anything past the Irish public, without an amendment, and saving a few bob and a lot of hassle in the process they met their nemesis in Raymond Crotty, initiator of the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution in 1987.

Crotty, who has since died, took a case to the Supreme Court against the government's attempt to adopt the Single European Act Treaty by simple majority vote in the parliament.

The Supreme Court ruled that the constitution did not permit the state to ratify the Single European Act as it entailed a diminution of the government's power to conduct the nation's foreign policy, a power the constitution grants explicitly to the government.

The Tenth Amendment of the Constitution was put to the people and passed. Since then there's been Maastricht in 1992, the Amsterdam Treaty in 1998 and Nice, on which Ireland voted in 2001 and again in 2002 so that they could get the answer right.

But never before the Lisbon Treaty has a referendum created so much confusion with almost everybody conceding that nobody knows what it is about.

Empowered to a unique and privileged degree, keenly aware that their European counterparts have no vote, the Irish public approaches amendment number 28 in the knowledge that rarely will so few decide for so many on so much, about which so little is understood.