The Irish Referendum

By Harry Hayfield, Special Correspondent to The Standard Magazine

 

The history of gay rights in the Irish Republic has been one of reality catching up fast. Being a homosexual man in Ireland was a criminal offence right up until 1990 (in the United Kingdom the act was decriminalized in 1963) and even then people were very reluctant to come out as being gay and Irish. A famous example of this was Stephen Gately, late of the boy band Boyzone, who came out in 1999 in an article for the British newspaper, The Sun. The referendum (ballot measure) held on May 22nd 2015 came about following a High Court action when Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan lost a case in the High Court in 2006 for the recognition by Ireland of their Canadian same-sex marriage. It wasn’t until 2011 following a coalition government pledge to create a Constitutional Convention to examine potential changes on specified issues, including “Provision for the legalization of same-sex marriage” and when the Convention considered the issue in May 2013 it voted to recommend that the state should be required, rather than merely permitted, to allow for same-sex marriage. The report was handed to the Prime Minister who announced that after parliamentary legislation had passed to enable a referendum on the issue, a referendum would be called.

Some legal academics claimed that extending marriage to same-sex couples did not require a constitutional amendment and could have been accomplished by an ordinary Act of the Oireachtas (the Irish state). Then-minister Shatter disagreed in November 2013, stating that there was “ample case law” to the effect that “marriage is understood as being between one man and one woman”. In January 2015, the wording of the proposed amendment was agreed at a special cabinet meeting and published in the press, and the bill was formally introduced in the Dáil (the Irish Parliament) by the Minister for Justice and Equality, Frances Fitzgerald. A separate Children and Family Relationships Act 2015 was passed in April 2015. This included adoption rights for same-sex couples – prior to the passing of the Act, single gay or lesbian people, or one of the partners in a same-sex couple could adopt, but joint adoption by both partners was not possible. The general scheme of this bill had been published for consultation in January 2014, and in 2015 it was passed by the Dáil on 12 March and the Seanad (the Irish second chamber) on 30 March but the legislation is yet to come into force.

In Ireland, unlike most European nations, polling on referenda is allowed right up until the day of the actual vote and in the last polls published the YES side appeared to have a lead. When excluding those who didn’t know how they would vote or refused to answer, Millward Brown for the Sunday Independent reported YES 69%, NO 31%, B&A for the Irish Sunday Times reported YES 63%, NO 26% with 11% undecided and Red C for the Sunday Business Post reported YES 73%, NO 27% when excluding undecided. The reason for this seemingly overwhelming approval comes from the fact that none of the major parties in the Irish Parliament objected to the policy. There are five main parties in the Irish Parliament and based on the poll by B&A the party splits are as follows:

  • Fianna Fail (Centrist): YES 53%, NO 41%, Undecided 6%
  • Fine Gael (Right of Centre): YES 60%, NO 28%, Undecided 12%
  • Labor (Left of Centre): YES 69%, NO 18%, Undecided 13%
  • Green Party: YES 100%
  • Sinn Fein (Left): YES 68%, NO 24%, Undecided 8%
  • Independents and Others: YES 61%, NO 30%, Undecided 9%
  • And even amongst those voters who refused to vote at a general election, the YES side had a lead of 41% (YES 62%, NO 21%, Undecided 17%)

The referendum was held on May 22nd 2015 with the polls open from 0700 BST until 2200 BST but as there was another referendum and a parliamentary by-election being voted on as well, the decision was made to count the votes on May 23rd 2015 and this started at 0900 BST. The first result was not announced until 1445 BST when the constituency of Sligo-North Leitrim declared that 19,043 votes had been cast in favor of the motion (53.6%) and 16,502 votes against the motion (46.4%) with 35,545 votes being cast in total (meaning that 57.3% of the people eligible to vote had done so), however before this formal announcement the result was becoming clear after tallymen, people employed by the campaigns to assess their performance, began to report that some areas in Dublin were reporting YES votes well in excess of 70% and so a little after 1100 BST the leader of the NO campaign conceded defeat, but a formal result was not announced until all 43 constituencies had announced their result. That announcement was made at Dublin Castle and stated that a total of 1,201,607 votes had been cast in favor of the motion (62.1%) and that 734,300 votes had been cast against the motion (37.9%) on a turnout of 60.09% and that as a result the referendum had passed with a majority of 24.1% and therefore following the formal ratification of the referendum result by the President of Ireland, Ireland’s constitution would be duly amended to allow same sex marriage.

Of the 43 constituencies, 42 returned a majority in favor of the motion with the range of majorities from as low as 0.1% in Donegal South West (YES 50.05%, NO 49.95%) to as high as 49.81% in Dublin South East (YES 74.91%, NO 25.09%) with the mid-range being a 23.44% majority in favor in Cork East (YES 61.72%, NO 38.28%). Only one constituency voted against the motion and that was Roscommon-South Leitrim (NO 51.42%, YES 48.58%). The map below shows the result by constituency with constituencies voting YES in green and those voting NO in red. The height of the constituency shows the majority scaled to 100m per % majority (so the majority in Dublin South East is represented by a green block 4,981m tall and a red block 284m tall represents the majority in Roscommon-South Leitrim.

This referendum result however will present a problem to those living in Northern Ireland (the part of the map with the various colours representing the result of the recent general election held on May 7th 2015). The brown colour represents the Democratic Unionist Party (who won 8 of the 18 seats in Northern Ireland) and polled 26% of the popular vote that are in charge in a coalition agreement with Sinn Fein of the Northern Ireland Assembly which has limited governing powers over the province. When the United Kingdom passed same sex marriage legislation in 2013 as part of the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition, the Democratic Unionists sought (and obtained) an assurance that the scheme would not happen in Northern Ireland, a situation that may continue until the next Assembly elections next May.

Harry Hayfield is a member of the British Liberal Democrats and is a councilman for his local village in Cardigan County in Wales and is an amateur psephlogist (a person who studies elections) since the British General Election of 1992. Although not a member of the LGBT community, he is appreciative of the struggle that the community has had over the last few decades and is pleased that it was a member of his party that allowed same sex marriage in the United Kingdom.