Golly. Mr. Kingsnorth really has bought into the De Valera, “800 years of oppression” interpretation of Irish history. De Valera blackened the past in order to grant the poverty-stricken Ireland of his own era, some measure of legitimacy. But that’s by the by.
There’s a lot left out here. Does the Irish state pay child allowance? If so, will that remain? And is he saying that the Irish state currently pays unemployment benefit to any mother who wants it, no questions asked, for as long as the mother wants it?
I’m left with the impression the referendum debate is that very English thing: a blazing political row about the square root of the proverbial.
Interesting questions. Patriarchy currently relies on the man paying for the mother of his children to stay at home to care for his home and children. Communism/ Socialism relies on State provision of childcare to release women into the paid workforce to enable others to be paid for childcare and domestic work.
Neither is satisfactory for those women who wish to be mothers and bring up their children themselves.
So yes perhaps it is time the State offered financial support to mothers who wish to provide their own childcare without being totally dependent on a man or having to pay for others to do the job they want to do.
And what rights and responsibilities would or should the State impose on supported mothers? Would domestic work be paid for perhaps? Wages for housework?
Do women want it? There has always been an ambivalence. Reasonably so.
True feminism would surely allow women to choose whether they brought up their own children instead of having to go out to work for others, to pay others to look after them. An experience only on offer to women of independent means or those dependent on the father/ husband who pays for them.
It’s a minefield.
In the 1939 census wives were designated as ‘unpaid domestic workers’ that is they were not available for wartime work. Motherhood wasn’t mentioned although that was the real reason why these women weren’t available for work outside the home.
We haven’t moved on. Motherhood hits at the heart of patriarchy and now identity politics, which seeing the difficulty, is erasing the term. We can only watch and wait.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the government needs to pay mothers to be mothers. A robust economy ought to provide a) decent-paying work, b) decent housing commensurate with a single income. It was that way when I was young, but that was a long time ago and, furthermore, the house we lived in was modest by today’s standards.
Your questions (assumptions) are misleading.. Yes, unemployment benefit is gender neutral and children alliowance is paid in Ireland.
I think you missed the crucial point: Ireland’s Constitution guarantees the RIGHT of a woman to remain a fulltime mother and homemaker IF SHE CHOOSES it. We also have Single Parent Allowance, Carer’s Allowance and Rent Support.. all of which btw are far more generous than their UK equivalents.
William Shaw
2 months ago
Irish feminists probably don’t appreciate the mansplaining.
Why are men being allowed to vote on this female issue?
The writer should probably keep his patriarchal opinions to himself, stop exercising his male privilege, and let the women decide the issue.
No one explained how two Irish feminists were elected President and four as Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) under this very article.
Martin M
2 months ago
This is perhaps not directly on point, but I for my part have zero sympathy for the Catholic Church in relation to the loss of its hold over the Irish people. The Church is reaping what it sowed.
What I mean is that if the clergy of the Catholic Church hadn’t turned themselves into a social club for paedophiles, the institution might be faring a little better today (and that’s not even going into the horrors associated with the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland).
Actually despite the media drumbeat, the abuse was hardly ever pedophilia and was almost all homosexual abuse of teenaged pubescent boys and young men. The sexual “Revolution” as the Marxist Marcuse named it. It carries on in the woke “gender” insanity. The west really has become a cult of lies.
I’ve had that point put to me before (possibly even by you), and I agree that it is a valid one, in a technical sense. However, I would make two points: 1) At least some of the abuse by Catholic priests is paedophilia, strictly defined. 2) If the rest of it is “homosexual abuse of teenaged pubescent boys and young men”, why does that make it ok? Aren’t Catholic priests supposed to be celibate? How can one respect them if they spend a significant portion of their time sexually abusing people (whether children, or young pubescents)? How can one respect the Church heirachy for blatantly covering up this activity?
It’s not on point at all! This is sure the poi t of the essay! Yes the RC clergy can rot but the Christian values it didn’t manage to snuff out remain not because of the RCC but despite it!
Ireland has legalised same sex marriage. There are those who would argue (and I’m not one of them) that that is not in accordance with “Christian Values”.
Same sex marriage is an ontological impossibility as two of the same sex obviously cannot “marry” which requires complimentary capacity. And now that we know (Ganna study) that such individuals who ordinarily emerge from broken homes and bad same sex parent relationships along with the very high percentage who are seriously sexually abused at the average age of eleven. And with over a million dead young men from the practice , perhaps sodomy stripes are not the most loving response to children who need help in natural human development. Real love.
Whether you agree with SSM is not to the point. The point is that Ireland (once the most rigidly Catholic country in Europe) has legalised it. Under the laws of Ireland, SSM is “marriage”.
Harry Phillips
2 months ago
Bizarrely, these obscure constitutional amendments of points that very few people are even aware of, are being pushed at a time when the nation is riven with demos expressing concern about immigration levels.
The outcomes are far from clear, but the agendas must be pushed regardless.
Milton Gibbon
2 months ago
Love PK’s writing but in defending state handouts for mothers he misses the point and is undermining his own professed idea of family as having inalienable rights. Once you start taking State money to support your lifestyle that lifestyle is going to be determined by the government. What he should be arguing for is for people to become poorer in monetary terms in order to live a more fulfilled life which the Irish state (and the West in general) has been attacking for decades. That is what he has on his website so I don’t know why he is pulling his punches here rather than writing about specific and minor constitutional changes that are already de facto.
Also, he forgot to mention the promise of the gay rights lobby that they were looking to maintain the family and just expand the meaning of the word to include homosexuals which has now been shown up.
If a state’s view, as written into its constitution, is of the nuclear family as the societal norm, then it is perfectly reasonable for state policies and funding to support and promote that norm. Supporting and promoting a norm does not require those outside the norm to be persecuted. Ie they don’t lose out, they just don’t benefit.
When so many of today’s problems have the undermining of the nuclear family as a causal or contributory factor, is it about time something was done to reverse the trend and not accelerate it further?
I don’t disagree in terms of the state undermining the nuclear family – I just think the more the state gets involved the more damage it can do. I am not sure exactly what support is given to single mothers in Ireland but I assume they fund and support other non-ideal forms of family rather than your utterly reasonable position of supporting and promoting a nuclear norm.
I think you’re touching on something that appears to be inherent to the Irish Constitution: a moral stance which is now becoming either eroded or changed. Therein lies the problem. It’s perfectly possible to have a constitution without it being imbued with a moral stance.
This subject was integral to an article in last week’s Unherd from Giles Fraser, where i argued in Comments that politicians should not take it upon themselves to be either exemplars or upholders of a particular morality, but to legislate according to the democratically expressed wishes of the population. If this were the case, and the ROI hadn’t decided to set itself up in such a way, there would be no need for these amendments to its constitution via referenda.
“What he should be arguing for is for people to become poorer in monetary terms in order to live a more fulfilled life which the Irish state (and the West in general) has been attacking for decades.”
This is the central – usually unasked – question in many contemporary political debates… How to navigate the tensions between economic/material productivity gains which yield better/happier/more satisfied life outcomes, and those which yield worse ones? What is the role of ideology, the state, incentives, etc. in shaping our collective and individual responses to that question? It’s a fascinating, complex, difficult issue, rarely asked in a direct manner.
The problem with governments is that they invariably become toxic and tyrannical. It’s a normal part of the human condition. The current form of government that we have now in the West is becoming rapidly obsolete, yet at the same time desperately clinging to its last vestiges of power.
Not all landlords were Protestant, and certainly not all tenants were Catholic. Under the Act of Union, Ireland held 16% of the seats in the UK House of Commons. The majority of the Irish electorate was Catholic and after 1829, so too were the majority of Irish MPs. For most of the period before 1916, most Irish people did not want to break from the UK and many identified strongly with British institutions, including the Army, the Navy and the Royal family. Ireland had some of the characteristics of a colony. But so too did Wales, or Yorkshire.
Well, one point of irony was the Catholic Earl of Antrim having mainly Presbyterian tenants – but that was very much the exception.
I would say successive general elections in 19th and early 20th century Ireland returned clear majority for Home Rule candidates whose raison d’etre was to take Ireland out of the UK, even if they would have maintained a closer relationship with Britain than the republicans (however factionalised between 1921 and 1948) who eventually came to power.
With a few exceptions the English were treated in a very similar manner, often by the same people. The industrial revolution changed that, but only from a few land owning people to a few factory owning people (in many cases the same people under a different guise).
Ireland didn’t really move to the industrial part and hence it remained under the land owning structure.
Come on now all ye revisionists. The irish people were/are a distinct people who were colonised in the sense that their land was taken from them, their language forbidden, their culture attacked ( pipers and harpists could be hung for example) and then subject to economic enslavement. I will accept that the average English commoner didnt do much better in the industrial revolition but that doesnt change the Irish experience of colonialism which is a historical fact by any standards regardless of any clever word play
Ireland didn’t become part of the United Kingdom until 1801. But it had effectively been a colony since the time of the Anglo-Norman conquest (12th century)
Paul MacDonnell
2 months ago
Nor was it a dependency…
Paul MacDonnell
2 months ago
Ireland was not a British colony.
Aphrodite Rises
2 months ago
Everywhere I look, I see the baby being thrown out with the bath water. Science sought to separate fact and superstition by doubting and demanding proof or evidence. By destroying every tradition we will eventually find out why the traditions existed and which traditions should have been retained.
Sounds to me like they want the Mom out of the house ASAP so the baby gets into Progressive Gov’t run Nanny-care for early indoctrination.
Lennon Ó Náraigh
2 months ago
Just as an important point of information in this era of misinformation: the 1937 Constitution did not make Ireland into a republic. The constitutional status of Ireland was kept deliberately vague in the 1937 document. Ireland was declared a republic in the Republic of Ireland Act 1949.
Also, the Irish Constitution does not say that a woman’s place is in the home. This is misinformation that has been spread by the government side in the upcoming referendum. The Supreme Court judge Marie Baker, Chair of the Electoral Commission, has clarified that the Constitution makes no such statement.
When government ministers were asked in a press conference recently why they were spreading misinformation, they walked out instead of answering the question.
Ireland is a vassal state, twice over.. at once subservient to our overlords in Brussels the like of warmongering Ursula Von der Leyen and again under instructions from the US like all the other “Western” countries. And the US is under the control of AIPAC, controlled by Netanyahu, in turn controlled by Satan himself.. So, there you have it.. One World Order at last! ..if you discount the BRICS++.
“whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” by Voltare.
Something to think about.
Jonathon
2 months ago
I’ve never given much thought to the constitution of our neighbours but it certainly is food for thought. I can see how the original wording can be seen as misogynistic but I do agree with the author it appears more to protect women who wish to remain at home. I wonder if thought was given to simply adding men to the clause in that way it would protect the (admittedly few) men who wish to stay at home, and that covers all basis – straight or gay.
The ability to see how others perceive something doesn’t mean I agree with that. Indeed if you read my very next sentence it quite literally states I don’t agree with that.
Sure, but approximately half of those women may be deprived of an existing RIGHT.. that they don’t want to lose.. As of now 100% of Irish women have that right to exercise IF THEY WISH.
How…in practical terms…would an Irish woman exercise that RIGHT? Will the state give you the money you need to raise your children without working?
Paul MacDonnell
2 months ago
Apart from my quibbles, this really is a superb article. Congratulations to the author!.
Paul MacDonnell
2 months ago
Over my time of living in Ireland until about 2016, as a citizen I was presented with numerous changes to the Constitution. In every single case that I can recall, I voted no.
Not really sometging to boast about.. some were laudable eg repeal of article 2 which brought nothing but hatred from many of our NI co countrymen. The recognition of gay marriage was also inmy opinion, correct. But I take your overall point.
I gather you think “gay” is a real thing. We now know (Ganna) that there is no such thing as a homosexual person by nature. Same genome. Its an obvious developmental disorder as the Danish Registry study and NYC AIDS abuse stats show. We should stop railroading children. Kids in the west are being told they aren’t really boys and girls. The death of the west is deserved.
What’s your genome got to do with your sexuality? In the 21st century pretty much all human behaviour is an “obvious developmental disorder” (says a man arguing with a man he does not know using a mobile phone).
Well, since voting for the first time in 1987 (Single European Act), I have only voted yes in one referendum to amend the Irish constitution. My first question in every case is “have all avenues been exhausted before putting this amendment?” Almost invariably the answer is no.
There have been constitutional amendments in Ireland on abortion, adoption, divorce, the death penalty, the right to bail, citizenship, extending the franchise in certain circumstances to non-citizens, the minimum age of the president, the university seats in the Senate, the existence of the Senate, whether proportional respresentation should be replaced by ‘first past the post’, the special position of the Catholic Church (which, by the way, was lifted straight out of Napoleon’s Concordat with Pius VII in 1801), same sex marriage, various European treaties and conventions (Accession to the Common Market, Single European Act, Maastricht, Nice, Lisbon – are there anymore?) and the British-Irish Agreement of 1998. That’s not an exhaustive list.
One thing is missing. There’s never been a referendum on whether Ireland should be a constitutional monarchy or a republic. In 1948, Ireland moved seamlessly from being one to the other by act of the Oireachtas (parliament). Ireland’s status as a republic, ironically, is a matter of statute law and not constitutional law. So, if the Oireachtas wanted to instate in the King of England or install the Stuart heir Franz Wittlesbach or empower the council of Gaelic princes to elect an Ard Rí (high king, whether The O’Neill or The O’Connor Don or The O’Brien of Thomond), the Constitution would not prevent them from doing so.
John Riordan
2 months ago
Articles like this make the membership fee worth it all on their own.
A document that locks in laws and attitudes of a particular moment in time, that can then be fiendishly hard to alter further down the track when situations and societal opinions change
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago
Ireland was colonised and/or settled in by Vikings, Anglo-Normans, English, Scots, Huguenots and others over many centuries, but was never a British colony. It was a Lordship with its own parliament judiciary and laws, throughout the Middle Ages, under Henry VIII it became a kingdom, and in 1800 its parliament was abolished and it joined Great Britain in the United Kingdom. It was one of the “Mother Countries” of the British Empire. It did not become a Republic in 1937 and nowhere does the word republic appear in the 1937 constitution. The king remained as part of the executive until the Republic if Ireland Act, 1949, changed the status of the state from undefined to republic.
Sorry but that’s just wrong. Following the Anglo-Norman conquest of 1169-1171 Ireland effectively became a colony. The lordship the English established in Ireland had a parliament, judiciary and laws, true, but these were for the benefit of English settlers, not the native Irish. The Irish were denied access to the English common law.
The vikings never got very far in Ireland. The Lordship of Ireland was held by the King of England as a vassal to the Pope under the terms of the Bull Laudabiliter. This is why Henry VIII had the Irish parliament vote him King of Ireland in 1541. BTW, they were only representative of the Anglo-Norman settlers, as already observed.
It is a fairly ham fisted attack on the family. Basically, its replacement of marriage with the term ” durable relationships” will allow the state to dictate rights rights and allocate resources to its favoured minorities. For example, a huge unreported fact in ireland is that the government is quietly buying a third of new housing stock, elevating prices for the average buyer ( usually families). This socialised housing stock will be allocated as the state/local officials see fit. The trend, as I see it is towards a dependend population rather then a strong family based culture. I do expect this amendend to be defeated which will leave a majority of the population who want a family based culture unrepresented by any parliamentary party ( as they are all dominated by progressives and pushing these changes) . Interesting
Alex Lekas
2 months ago
Welcome to progress, which is not always what it’s sold as being and full of contradictions. To wit, this referendum is being cast as either harming or benefitting women, in a time when “woman” itself is being stripped of meaning.
Men and women are unintelligible outside of their obvious relatedness to one another sexually. Insanity kills.
Liam O'Mahony
2 months ago
Can’t argue with any of that.. I can never disagree with Paul Kingsnorth it seems. Is the wisest man in Ireland*? Probably.
Yeah I know he’s English by birth etc but he us one of us now..
Liam O'Mahony
2 months ago
Arguably, the procreation and upbringing of children is THE most important function in any country.
Indeed. Were it not for children, who would there be for Priests to sexually abuse?
Pip G
2 months ago
That Ireland has been freed from a culture ruled by the reactionary state and a Church of superstition rather than Jesus Christ is welcome. I visited Ireland before it joined the EU and found it desperately poor, with passive superstitious people. Later I found a young confident people who treat us British as friends and equals. That must be welcome.
However, transition to a ‘progressive’ [what does that mean – progress to what?] country with imposition of a culture of individualism, destruction of family & society, and materialism leads to a demoralised (sic) people whose function is to be workers and consumers. As the writer says “What is a human for”?
A key element to constrain this is that the Church must come out of its backwardness and rediscover its rich heritage and philosophy articulated by the Church fathers: that we live in a family, a community, and a country; support each other; follow eternal principles. The reverse approach adopted in the UK will be harmful for the Irish not liberating. Regrettably the Church in England and Ireland seems unable to do this, having withdrawn into management & maintenance of declining congregations.
As I live in the dying west, Canada, and know the church’s teachings and sacraments, I would state that the Catholic church is the only possible answer to human life and its deepest reality. She IS sanity, as her founder is who He claims to be.
Any comment on why this Founder seems content for so many clergy in His Church to sexually abuse children?
Marissa M
2 months ago
It was always about choice though, wasn’t it?
It became about how quickly can you dump the kid off in daycare and rush back to work. It became about perpetrating the lie “you can have it all.”
It’s the same in the US, 56% of mothers would rather stay home. And I bet it you coordinated that with the percentage of mothers who wished they hadn’t even had children, it would be much higher.
If any of that 56% of mothers can afford to stay home, they are at liberty to do so.
Samuel Ross
2 months ago
If Ireland wants to abort all the Irish babies, that only means that there will be fewer Irish idiots to plague the world. 50 years hence, the Irish population will probably be 5 million. 1 million Irish, 4 million Muslim Irish, as they have 6 or 7 babies per women, while the average Irish woman has 0.3 babies.
Peter Shaw
2 months ago
Ireland is changing. Women will one day be forced to stay at home.
Why? The idea of women staying at home is so “last century”!
Tom More
2 months ago
As a Canadian Catholic who watched what the JJCCJ report on abuse in the Catholic church being homosexual(81%) and not pedophilia, and with the Catholic church now being the safest institution for children on earth, it is a great shame that the naive openness of the church in the ’60’s sexual revolution has led to such a diminishment.
As shame also because Catholicism offers the only radically coherent and consistent view on the planet. I watch the west literally disintegrating around me. Divorce should of course be illegal as children don’t lose their need for a mom and dad and marriage is about protecting children. Human nature doesn’t change even in this age of narcissistic materialism, an incoherent ideology that rules the no longer liberal liberals.
I am a liberal incidentally and so of course I support all natural human goods from conception to natural death. I would of course be guilty of murder if I supported killing the innocent at their most vulnerable stages.
And of course the very idea of “feminism” as it chokes out of existence with the west is a patent absurdity. Men and women; the two sexes, are so blatantly obviously only intelligible in their relationship together for the joy of life.
And the insanity and decades long lies about “gender” are but the logical consequence of seeking to deny reality itself.
The church is about love. She is as she always was, the Body of Christ and she is what the words sanity and truth actually mean. I majored in western philosophy from the presocratics on incidentally and know Hume’s absurd “fork” rule.. which so ironically breaks his “fork” rule.
A cosmos , as C S Lewis learned from G K Chesterton and expressed so brilliantly can only trust what we call reason, if REASON is the ground of being. And of course it as as Aquinas showed and human reason can determine from solid evidences and sound argument.
Irish women .. all women … should not be forced into the workplace against their will, as the Marxist de Beauvoir insisted and the suicide of the west is not written in stone.
“Divorce should of course be illegal as children don’t lose their need for a mom and dad“. Children don’t lose a mom and dad because of divorce. It’s just that mom and dad live in different houses.
Melissa Martin
2 months ago
The Pill etc has paradoxically extended the maidenhood, the naïveté of young women.
These constitutional amendments are pushed far left NGO’s who have way too much influence in government. They’ve pushed this one too far. There will be a strong No No vote in this.. a bloody nose for the ruling cabal and hopefully by extension a lessening of the influence of Marxist NGO’s.
james elliott
1 month ago
“What we are seeing here is a familiar story across the West today: the collusion of progressive values and corporate power”
Ah yes, the merging of (Left wing) Political will with Corporate power.
Or, to give it its proper name, ‘Fascism’.
Betsy Warrior
1 month ago
This new interpretation of the law seems an underhanded way of depriving mothers and their children of a healthy developmental stage to bond – instead adding more bodies to the labor pool which would profit corporations and employers. She would have to employ someone else to take over her work caring for her child when she’s at another job. This would double mothers’ workload as they will still have to come home to laundry, cooking, vacuuming, dishes as well as all their parenting duties like helping with homework and emotional needs. Please DON’T say if mothers go to work meaning outside the home as EVERY MOTHER IS A WORKING MOTHER on a 24 hour shift. Mothering work is just a more deeply committed work than other kinds. Just because motherhood is part of nature doesn’t make it any less laborious – it just seems to make it more invisible.
“This would double mothers’ workload as they will still have to come home to laundry, cooking, vacuuming, dishes as well as all their parenting duties like helping with homework and emotional needs“.
Why wouldn’t fathers help with this?
Tobias Mayer
1 month ago
I imagine you are relieved, even happy with the actual Non/No result of the vote, in what is being described as a landslide. It seems the Irish people, for the most part, saw through this lie. But what next though, in this woke onslaught of common sense and the common good? We must, as Jesus tells us, “stay awake”.
Paul your work is a beautiful glimmer of light on a very dark, deep lake. Thank you for all that you do.
Golly. Mr. Kingsnorth really has bought into the De Valera, “800 years of oppression” interpretation of Irish history. De Valera blackened the past in order to grant the poverty-stricken Ireland of his own era, some measure of legitimacy. But that’s by the by.
There’s a lot left out here. Does the Irish state pay child allowance? If so, will that remain? And is he saying that the Irish state currently pays unemployment benefit to any mother who wants it, no questions asked, for as long as the mother wants it?
I’m left with the impression the referendum debate is that very English thing: a blazing political row about the square root of the proverbial.
Interesting questions. Patriarchy currently relies on the man paying for the mother of his children to stay at home to care for his home and children. Communism/ Socialism relies on State provision of childcare to release women into the paid workforce to enable others to be paid for childcare and domestic work.
Neither is satisfactory for those women who wish to be mothers and bring up their children themselves.
So yes perhaps it is time the State offered financial support to mothers who wish to provide their own childcare without being totally dependent on a man or having to pay for others to do the job they want to do.
And what rights and responsibilities would or should the State impose on supported mothers? Would domestic work be paid for perhaps? Wages for housework?
Do women want it? There has always been an ambivalence. Reasonably so.
True feminism would surely allow women to choose whether they brought up their own children instead of having to go out to work for others, to pay others to look after them. An experience only on offer to women of independent means or those dependent on the father/ husband who pays for them.
It’s a minefield.
In the 1939 census wives were designated as ‘unpaid domestic workers’ that is they were not available for wartime work. Motherhood wasn’t mentioned although that was the real reason why these women weren’t available for work outside the home.
We haven’t moved on. Motherhood hits at the heart of patriarchy and now identity politics, which seeing the difficulty, is erasing the term. We can only watch and wait.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the government needs to pay mothers to be mothers. A robust economy ought to provide a) decent-paying work, b) decent housing commensurate with a single income. It was that way when I was young, but that was a long time ago and, furthermore, the house we lived in was modest by today’s standards.
Your questions (assumptions) are misleading.. Yes, unemployment benefit is gender neutral and children alliowance is paid in Ireland.
I think you missed the crucial point: Ireland’s Constitution guarantees the RIGHT of a woman to remain a fulltime mother and homemaker IF SHE CHOOSES it. We also have Single Parent Allowance, Carer’s Allowance and Rent Support.. all of which btw are far more generous than their UK equivalents.
Irish feminists probably don’t appreciate the mansplaining.
Why are men being allowed to vote on this female issue?
The writer should probably keep his patriarchal opinions to himself, stop exercising his male privilege, and let the women decide the issue.
Can I just ask if your volley of odd ‘patriarchy’ tropes is intended seriously, or as parody? Genuine enquiry.
Pretty sure he’s joking. I hope so anyway, for his own sake.
It’s really hard to tell these days, especially online.
William, you are on middle-class, apologetic male autopilot. Engage your brain.
William is pulling our legs.
Humour in GB Shaw vein?
Naw, you issued the core point..
No one explained how two Irish feminists were elected President and four as Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) under this very article.
This is perhaps not directly on point, but I for my part have zero sympathy for the Catholic Church in relation to the loss of its hold over the Irish people. The Church is reaping what it sowed.
As a Catholic, I agree with you.
Explain please
What I mean is that if the clergy of the Catholic Church hadn’t turned themselves into a social club for paedophiles, the institution might be faring a little better today (and that’s not even going into the horrors associated with the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland).
Actually despite the media drumbeat, the abuse was hardly ever pedophilia and was almost all homosexual abuse of teenaged pubescent boys and young men. The sexual “Revolution” as the Marxist Marcuse named it. It carries on in the woke “gender” insanity. The west really has become a cult of lies.
I’ve had that point put to me before (possibly even by you), and I agree that it is a valid one, in a technical sense. However, I would make two points: 1) At least some of the abuse by Catholic priests is paedophilia, strictly defined. 2) If the rest of it is “homosexual abuse of teenaged pubescent boys and young men”, why does that make it ok? Aren’t Catholic priests supposed to be celibate? How can one respect them if they spend a significant portion of their time sexually abusing people (whether children, or young pubescents)? How can one respect the Church heirachy for blatantly covering up this activity?
It’s not on point at all! This is sure the poi t of the essay! Yes the RC clergy can rot but the Christian values it didn’t manage to snuff out remain not because of the RCC but despite it!
Ireland has legalised same sex marriage. There are those who would argue (and I’m not one of them) that that is not in accordance with “Christian Values”.
Same sex marriage is an ontological impossibility as two of the same sex obviously cannot “marry” which requires complimentary capacity. And now that we know (Ganna study) that such individuals who ordinarily emerge from broken homes and bad same sex parent relationships along with the very high percentage who are seriously sexually abused at the average age of eleven. And with over a million dead young men from the practice , perhaps sodomy stripes are not the most loving response to children who need help in natural human development. Real love.
Whether you agree with SSM is not to the point. The point is that Ireland (once the most rigidly Catholic country in Europe) has legalised it. Under the laws of Ireland, SSM is “marriage”.
Bizarrely, these obscure constitutional amendments of points that very few people are even aware of, are being pushed at a time when the nation is riven with demos expressing concern about immigration levels.
The outcomes are far from clear, but the agendas must be pushed regardless.
Love PK’s writing but in defending state handouts for mothers he misses the point and is undermining his own professed idea of family as having inalienable rights. Once you start taking State money to support your lifestyle that lifestyle is going to be determined by the government. What he should be arguing for is for people to become poorer in monetary terms in order to live a more fulfilled life which the Irish state (and the West in general) has been attacking for decades. That is what he has on his website so I don’t know why he is pulling his punches here rather than writing about specific and minor constitutional changes that are already de facto.
Also, he forgot to mention the promise of the gay rights lobby that they were looking to maintain the family and just expand the meaning of the word to include homosexuals which has now been shown up.
If a state’s view, as written into its constitution, is of the nuclear family as the societal norm, then it is perfectly reasonable for state policies and funding to support and promote that norm. Supporting and promoting a norm does not require those outside the norm to be persecuted. Ie they don’t lose out, they just don’t benefit.
When so many of today’s problems have the undermining of the nuclear family as a causal or contributory factor, is it about time something was done to reverse the trend and not accelerate it further?
I don’t disagree in terms of the state undermining the nuclear family – I just think the more the state gets involved the more damage it can do. I am not sure exactly what support is given to single mothers in Ireland but I assume they fund and support other non-ideal forms of family rather than your utterly reasonable position of supporting and promoting a nuclear norm.
I think you’re touching on something that appears to be inherent to the Irish Constitution: a moral stance which is now becoming either eroded or changed. Therein lies the problem. It’s perfectly possible to have a constitution without it being imbued with a moral stance.
This subject was integral to an article in last week’s Unherd from Giles Fraser, where i argued in Comments that politicians should not take it upon themselves to be either exemplars or upholders of a particular morality, but to legislate according to the democratically expressed wishes of the population. If this were the case, and the ROI hadn’t decided to set itself up in such a way, there would be no need for these amendments to its constitution via referenda.
“What he should be arguing for is for people to become poorer in monetary terms in order to live a more fulfilled life which the Irish state (and the West in general) has been attacking for decades.”
This is the central – usually unasked – question in many contemporary political debates… How to navigate the tensions between economic/material productivity gains which yield better/happier/more satisfied life outcomes, and those which yield worse ones? What is the role of ideology, the state, incentives, etc. in shaping our collective and individual responses to that question? It’s a fascinating, complex, difficult issue, rarely asked in a direct manner.
You seem to imply the State is the enemy of the Family.. maybe under extreme Communism yes, but otherwise surely not?
The problem with governments is that they invariably become toxic and tyrannical. It’s a normal part of the human condition. The current form of government that we have now in the West is becoming rapidly obsolete, yet at the same time desperately clinging to its last vestiges of power.
I agree it’s all moving in the wrong direction. In Ireland we hold onto values a bit better but yes, it is slipping.
Ireland was never a British colony. It was part of the UK.
Considering that Irish peasants were ruled by an arrogant protestant overclass putting the yoke on them and their faith, I would say this is wrong.
Not all landlords were Protestant, and certainly not all tenants were Catholic. Under the Act of Union, Ireland held 16% of the seats in the UK House of Commons. The majority of the Irish electorate was Catholic and after 1829, so too were the majority of Irish MPs. For most of the period before 1916, most Irish people did not want to break from the UK and many identified strongly with British institutions, including the Army, the Navy and the Royal family. Ireland had some of the characteristics of a colony. But so too did Wales, or Yorkshire.
A tad disingenuous.. draconian English rule with zero Irish involvement for how many of the 700 years of effective colonisation?
Well, one point of irony was the Catholic Earl of Antrim having mainly Presbyterian tenants – but that was very much the exception.
I would say successive general elections in 19th and early 20th century Ireland returned clear majority for Home Rule candidates whose raison d’etre was to take Ireland out of the UK, even if they would have maintained a closer relationship with Britain than the republicans (however factionalised between 1921 and 1948) who eventually came to power.
With a few exceptions the English were treated in a very similar manner, often by the same people. The industrial revolution changed that, but only from a few land owning people to a few factory owning people (in many cases the same people under a different guise).
Ireland didn’t really move to the industrial part and hence it remained under the land owning structure.
I should clarify. It’ll be wrong to describe Ireland as a British colony after the 1600s.
..a mere technicality. In any case, for most of it’s occupation it was governed directly from England so the technicality I even less relevant.
Come on now all ye revisionists. The irish people were/are a distinct people who were colonised in the sense that their land was taken from them, their language forbidden, their culture attacked ( pipers and harpists could be hung for example) and then subject to economic enslavement. I will accept that the average English commoner didnt do much better in the industrial revolition but that doesnt change the Irish experience of colonialism which is a historical fact by any standards regardless of any clever word play
hanged
Ireland didn’t become part of the United Kingdom until 1801. But it had effectively been a colony since the time of the Anglo-Norman conquest (12th century)
Nor was it a dependency…
Ireland was not a British colony.
Everywhere I look, I see the baby being thrown out with the bath water. Science sought to separate fact and superstition by doubting and demanding proof or evidence. By destroying every tradition we will eventually find out why the traditions existed and which traditions should have been retained.
But then it’s too late, sadly.
But we can restore such values if enough of us want to.. I thi know it might happen?
Chesterton’s fence
Sounds to me like they want the Mom out of the house ASAP so the baby gets into Progressive Gov’t run Nanny-care for early indoctrination.
Just as an important point of information in this era of misinformation: the 1937 Constitution did not make Ireland into a republic. The constitutional status of Ireland was kept deliberately vague in the 1937 document. Ireland was declared a republic in the Republic of Ireland Act 1949.
Also, the Irish Constitution does not say that a woman’s place is in the home. This is misinformation that has been spread by the government side in the upcoming referendum. The Supreme Court judge Marie Baker, Chair of the Electoral Commission, has clarified that the Constitution makes no such statement.
When government ministers were asked in a press conference recently why they were spreading misinformation, they walked out instead of answering the question.
Ireland is a vassal state, twice over.. at once subservient to our overlords in Brussels the like of warmongering Ursula Von der Leyen and again under instructions from the US like all the other “Western” countries. And the US is under the control of AIPAC, controlled by Netanyahu, in turn controlled by Satan himself.. So, there you have it.. One World Order at last! ..if you discount the BRICS++.
“whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” by Voltare.
Something to think about.
I’ve never given much thought to the constitution of our neighbours but it certainly is food for thought. I can see how the original wording can be seen as misogynistic but I do agree with the author it appears more to protect women who wish to remain at home. I wonder if thought was given to simply adding men to the clause in that way it would protect the (admittedly few) men who wish to stay at home, and that covers all basis – straight or gay.
What’s misogynistic about the original wording? Paternalistic perhaps, patriarchal if you must, but not evidence of woman-hatred.
The ability to see how others perceive something doesn’t mean I agree with that. Indeed if you read my very next sentence it quite literally states I don’t agree with that.
Irish women deserve what they vote for.
Sure, but approximately half of those women may be deprived of an existing RIGHT.. that they don’t want to lose.. As of now 100% of Irish women have that right to exercise IF THEY WISH.
How…in practical terms…would an Irish woman exercise that RIGHT? Will the state give you the money you need to raise your children without working?
Apart from my quibbles, this really is a superb article. Congratulations to the author!.
Over my time of living in Ireland until about 2016, as a citizen I was presented with numerous changes to the Constitution. In every single case that I can recall, I voted no.
Not really sometging to boast about.. some were laudable eg repeal of article 2 which brought nothing but hatred from many of our NI co countrymen. The recognition of gay marriage was also inmy opinion, correct. But I take your overall point.
Oh yes, I voted yes to that! That was the exception.
I gather you think “gay” is a real thing. We now know (Ganna) that there is no such thing as a homosexual person by nature. Same genome. Its an obvious developmental disorder as the Danish Registry study and NYC AIDS abuse stats show. We should stop railroading children. Kids in the west are being told they aren’t really boys and girls. The death of the west is deserved.
Yes, the world will be a far better place when China and Russia are running it.
What’s your genome got to do with your sexuality? In the 21st century pretty much all human behaviour is an “obvious developmental disorder” (says a man arguing with a man he does not know using a mobile phone).
Well, since voting for the first time in 1987 (Single European Act), I have only voted yes in one referendum to amend the Irish constitution. My first question in every case is “have all avenues been exhausted before putting this amendment?” Almost invariably the answer is no.
There have been constitutional amendments in Ireland on abortion, adoption, divorce, the death penalty, the right to bail, citizenship, extending the franchise in certain circumstances to non-citizens, the minimum age of the president, the university seats in the Senate, the existence of the Senate, whether proportional respresentation should be replaced by ‘first past the post’, the special position of the Catholic Church (which, by the way, was lifted straight out of Napoleon’s Concordat with Pius VII in 1801), same sex marriage, various European treaties and conventions (Accession to the Common Market, Single European Act, Maastricht, Nice, Lisbon – are there anymore?) and the British-Irish Agreement of 1998. That’s not an exhaustive list.
One thing is missing. There’s never been a referendum on whether Ireland should be a constitutional monarchy or a republic. In 1948, Ireland moved seamlessly from being one to the other by act of the Oireachtas (parliament). Ireland’s status as a republic, ironically, is a matter of statute law and not constitutional law. So, if the Oireachtas wanted to instate in the King of England or install the Stuart heir Franz Wittlesbach or empower the council of Gaelic princes to elect an Ard Rí (high king, whether The O’Neill or The O’Connor Don or The O’Brien of Thomond), the Constitution would not prevent them from doing so.
Articles like this make the membership fee worth it all on their own.
Bravo, Mr Kingsnorth.
A written constitution? What’s that?
A document that locks in laws and attitudes of a particular moment in time, that can then be fiendishly hard to alter further down the track when situations and societal opinions change
Ireland was colonised and/or settled in by Vikings, Anglo-Normans, English, Scots, Huguenots and others over many centuries, but was never a British colony. It was a Lordship with its own parliament judiciary and laws, throughout the Middle Ages, under Henry VIII it became a kingdom, and in 1800 its parliament was abolished and it joined Great Britain in the United Kingdom. It was one of the “Mother Countries” of the British Empire. It did not become a Republic in 1937 and nowhere does the word republic appear in the 1937 constitution. The king remained as part of the executive until the Republic if Ireland Act, 1949, changed the status of the state from undefined to republic.
Sorry but that’s just wrong. Following the Anglo-Norman conquest of 1169-1171 Ireland effectively became a colony. The lordship the English established in Ireland had a parliament, judiciary and laws, true, but these were for the benefit of English settlers, not the native Irish. The Irish were denied access to the English common law.
The vikings never got very far in Ireland. The Lordship of Ireland was held by the King of England as a vassal to the Pope under the terms of the Bull Laudabiliter. This is why Henry VIII had the Irish parliament vote him King of Ireland in 1541. BTW, they were only representative of the Anglo-Norman settlers, as already observed.
Worth a watch:
https://unherd.com/watch-listen/why-the-american-right-loves-viktor-orban/
Hungary has similar family promoting things written into its constitution and provides support and incentives to women who have children. With the diabolical state of most western countrys’ fertility rate who can say Orban is wrong?
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/HUN/hungary/fertility-rate
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRL/ireland/fertility-rate
It is a fairly ham fisted attack on the family. Basically, its replacement of marriage with the term ” durable relationships” will allow the state to dictate rights rights and allocate resources to its favoured minorities. For example, a huge unreported fact in ireland is that the government is quietly buying a third of new housing stock, elevating prices for the average buyer ( usually families). This socialised housing stock will be allocated as the state/local officials see fit. The trend, as I see it is towards a dependend population rather then a strong family based culture. I do expect this amendend to be defeated which will leave a majority of the population who want a family based culture unrepresented by any parliamentary party ( as they are all dominated by progressives and pushing these changes) . Interesting
Welcome to progress, which is not always what it’s sold as being and full of contradictions. To wit, this referendum is being cast as either harming or benefitting women, in a time when “woman” itself is being stripped of meaning.
Men and women are unintelligible outside of their obvious relatedness to one another sexually. Insanity kills.
Can’t argue with any of that.. I can never disagree with Paul Kingsnorth it seems. Is the wisest man in Ireland*? Probably.
Yeah I know he’s English by birth etc but he us one of us now..
Arguably, the procreation and upbringing of children is THE most important function in any country.
Indeed. Were it not for children, who would there be for Priests to sexually abuse?
That Ireland has been freed from a culture ruled by the reactionary state and a Church of superstition rather than Jesus Christ is welcome. I visited Ireland before it joined the EU and found it desperately poor, with passive superstitious people. Later I found a young confident people who treat us British as friends and equals. That must be welcome.
However, transition to a ‘progressive’ [what does that mean – progress to what?] country with imposition of a culture of individualism, destruction of family & society, and materialism leads to a demoralised (sic) people whose function is to be workers and consumers. As the writer says “What is a human for”?
A key element to constrain this is that the Church must come out of its backwardness and rediscover its rich heritage and philosophy articulated by the Church fathers: that we live in a family, a community, and a country; support each other; follow eternal principles. The reverse approach adopted in the UK will be harmful for the Irish not liberating. Regrettably the Church in England and Ireland seems unable to do this, having withdrawn into management & maintenance of declining congregations.
As I live in the dying west, Canada, and know the church’s teachings and sacraments, I would state that the Catholic church is the only possible answer to human life and its deepest reality. She IS sanity, as her founder is who He claims to be.
Any comment on why this Founder seems content for so many clergy in His Church to sexually abuse children?
It was always about choice though, wasn’t it?
It became about how quickly can you dump the kid off in daycare and rush back to work. It became about perpetrating the lie “you can have it all.”
It’s the same in the US, 56% of mothers would rather stay home. And I bet it you coordinated that with the percentage of mothers who wished they hadn’t even had children, it would be much higher.
If any of that 56% of mothers can afford to stay home, they are at liberty to do so.
If Ireland wants to abort all the Irish babies, that only means that there will be fewer Irish idiots to plague the world. 50 years hence, the Irish population will probably be 5 million. 1 million Irish, 4 million Muslim Irish, as they have 6 or 7 babies per women, while the average Irish woman has 0.3 babies.
Ireland is changing. Women will one day be forced to stay at home.
Why? The idea of women staying at home is so “last century”!
As a Canadian Catholic who watched what the JJCCJ report on abuse in the Catholic church being homosexual(81%) and not pedophilia, and with the Catholic church now being the safest institution for children on earth, it is a great shame that the naive openness of the church in the ’60’s sexual revolution has led to such a diminishment.
As shame also because Catholicism offers the only radically coherent and consistent view on the planet. I watch the west literally disintegrating around me. Divorce should of course be illegal as children don’t lose their need for a mom and dad and marriage is about protecting children. Human nature doesn’t change even in this age of narcissistic materialism, an incoherent ideology that rules the no longer liberal liberals.
I am a liberal incidentally and so of course I support all natural human goods from conception to natural death. I would of course be guilty of murder if I supported killing the innocent at their most vulnerable stages.
And of course the very idea of “feminism” as it chokes out of existence with the west is a patent absurdity. Men and women; the two sexes, are so blatantly obviously only intelligible in their relationship together for the joy of life.
And the insanity and decades long lies about “gender” are but the logical consequence of seeking to deny reality itself.
The church is about love. She is as she always was, the Body of Christ and she is what the words sanity and truth actually mean. I majored in western philosophy from the presocratics on incidentally and know Hume’s absurd “fork” rule.. which so ironically breaks his “fork” rule.
A cosmos , as C S Lewis learned from G K Chesterton and expressed so brilliantly can only trust what we call reason, if REASON is the ground of being. And of course it as as Aquinas showed and human reason can determine from solid evidences and sound argument.
Irish women .. all women … should not be forced into the workplace against their will, as the Marxist de Beauvoir insisted and the suicide of the west is not written in stone.
“Divorce should of course be illegal as children don’t lose their need for a mom and dad“. Children don’t lose a mom and dad because of divorce. It’s just that mom and dad live in different houses.
The Pill etc has paradoxically extended the maidenhood, the naïveté of young women.
“The Pill etc”? What is included under “etc”?
These constitutional amendments are pushed far left NGO’s who have way too much influence in government. They’ve pushed this one too far. There will be a strong No No vote in this.. a bloody nose for the ruling cabal and hopefully by extension a lessening of the influence of Marxist NGO’s.
“What we are seeing here is a familiar story across the West today: the collusion of progressive values and corporate power”
Ah yes, the merging of (Left wing) Political will with Corporate power.
Or, to give it its proper name, ‘Fascism’.
This new interpretation of the law seems an underhanded way of depriving mothers and their children of a healthy developmental stage to bond – instead adding more bodies to the labor pool which would profit corporations and employers. She would have to employ someone else to take over her work caring for her child when she’s at another job. This would double mothers’ workload as they will still have to come home to laundry, cooking, vacuuming, dishes as well as all their parenting duties like helping with homework and emotional needs. Please DON’T say if mothers go to work meaning outside the home as EVERY MOTHER IS A WORKING MOTHER on a 24 hour shift. Mothering work is just a more deeply committed work than other kinds. Just because motherhood is part of nature doesn’t make it any less laborious – it just seems to make it more invisible.
“This would double mothers’ workload as they will still have to come home to laundry, cooking, vacuuming, dishes as well as all their parenting duties like helping with homework and emotional needs“.
Why wouldn’t fathers help with this?
I imagine you are relieved, even happy with the actual Non/No result of the vote, in what is being described as a landslide. It seems the Irish people, for the most part, saw through this lie. But what next though, in this woke onslaught of common sense and the common good? We must, as Jesus tells us, “stay awake”.
Paul your work is a beautiful glimmer of light on a very dark, deep lake. Thank you for all that you do.