The National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) was campaigning for a No vote in the referendum even though the McKenna judgement prohibits state funded bodies from spending state monies. If the NWCI was using ‘non-state’ monies as it has claimed it should publish the amounts raised, and from where and how they were spent, in the interest of democracy, transparency. Writing in The Irish Times before the vote its director Orla O’Connor wrote: “It [a No vote] gives the State the oppressive role of keeping women from careers or employment of our own…”. How does The Irish Times allow such misinformation to be perpetuated in its pages? Ms O’Connor has also been recently appointed as an expert adviser to the new Electoral Commission, a position that seems far from tenable in the wake of the referendum defeat but as we have seen in the case of RTÉ, the same faces get appointed over and over to the most influential jobs.
And how does the Government tally its recently set up National Counter Disinformation Strategy Working Group when it, in the form of its ministers and many others in the political establishment, go out on the Leinster house plinth and tell porkies to the media and don’t even have the decency to blush when doing so?
What the referendum campaign has clearly demonstrated to the Irish people is that under this government, misinformation is a one-way street and just as almost the entire opposition in the Dáil, even with their doubts and misgivings about the language proposed in the referenda, rowed in with the government and establishment, so too did the media for the most part. Even after the result the media brought on the same old talking heads who re-ran the Yes arguments and in some cases blamed the far-right. Why not insult the electorate one more time!
The truth is unsavoury in modern elitist Ireland. NGOs were told in no uncertain terms by Minister for Equality Roderic O’Gorman that they would have to explain why they want to maintain the ‘status quo’ if they campaign against a Yes vote in the referendum. Threat received loud and clear and the NGOs all rolled over. This is modern bully Ireland, funded by the tax-payer.
What perplexed many was why the NGOs were in such a rush to endorse a Yes/Yes vote even before the wording was settled. The old maxim, who benefits is the key question here.
Lois McLatchie writing in The Critic says that for the progessive left and the woke brigade the Irish Constitution upends the norm of the modern West to displace traditional views of families and motherhood. “Where most countries have forgotten to value women in all their unique capacities, the Irish were phenomenally progressive in attributing social recognition and legal protection to the caregiving roles that a majority of women have at least some hand in.”
Article 41.2 of the Constitution she writes contains “progressive provisions that many British women would give their right arm for. Decades of so-called UK ‘maternity policy’ has been geared towards getting us back in the workplace as soon as possible after birth. An unforgiving family-unfriendly tax system puts pressure on both parents to work every hour available, outsourcing childcare. More than a third of UK working mums with children under four would prefer to stay at home full time; and in Ireland, it’s two-thirds. The Brits ultimately fail to provide women the choice to focus on motherhood at a crucial point in their life and that of their baby’s. The Irish do protect this choice; at least in theory. They should advance this in practice.”
On International Women’s Day Ireland defended the right of Irish women to choose whether or not to be full-time mums. The NWCI says on their website that “We are active in ensuring that no woman is left behind in our journey to achieve true equality”. The truth is that Irish women have left the NWCI behind and the rest of the Irish ‘elite’ in defending a universal truth that cannot be erased, that of womanhood and motherhood and thank God for it.