Aftershocks of 2011

A thought recently occurred to me that 7 years on from the historic general election of 2011, we are still feeling its effects. Three recent events have led me to this view.

The first is the biggest; the repeal of the 8th amendment. The margin of victory begs the question as to why it took so long for repeal to happen and why getting to the point of repeal was so politically controversial and tortuous.

The simply answer to this is Fianna Fail (FF). FF were the pro-life party. They backed the 8th amendment in 1983, where FG were divided and Labour were against. Bertie Ahern's government sought to tighten the constitutional ban on abortion in 2001 (and lost by the narrowest of margins). The RTE exit poll from the 2018 referendum showed that FF voters were the most pro-life. 

FF were the political vanguard of the pro-life movement. And with their dominance came, amongst many other things, the domination of a pro-life point of view. So what happened to FF? Well, in 2011 Ireland's natural party of government imploded in spectacular form. The financial crisis crashed the economy and it crashed FF with it.

With FF swept from power, the space was made for a pro-choice point of view to emerge. I don't mean to suggest that the Irish people were really pro-choice all along, or at least since the X-case, and that FF hegemony repressed this.

The role of the party since the 60s was to reconcile a foreign direct investment-led liberal capitalism with the traditional national narrative. Its iconic leaders since the 60s - Lynch, Haughey, Ahern - were about making the old and new gel, ensuring that no democratic disenchantment emerged.

The economic and the traditional were always in friction with each other. When the economic model blew up, FF blew up with it. And with them, the careful balancing of old and new ended. Fast forward 7 years and the economy is back on track, but FF is only a shell of its former self. The economic now dictates everything, with no countermanding narrative to keep it in check. 

The second event is FF's endorsement of Michael D Higgins for re-election to the presidency. That this may be smart politics in the current environment is neither here nor there. The fact is we've come a long way since the days when the party practically owned the presidency.

The third event is the appointment of a British security agent to the role of Garda commissioner, something welcomed by FF. Again, probably smart politics, but indicative of the extent to which "the republican party" dances to the tune set by others rather than its own nationalist instincts.

Had FG won the 2007 general election on the eve of the crash, and had FF got back into power with a mandate and a majority to last them a decade, FF would be continuing to do what it used to, rather than following the liberal trends as set by others.

Interpreting repeal

Looking at the referendum to repeal the 8th amendment to the Irish constitution on 25 May 2018, there seems to be two basic interpretations of the final vote. I will call the first the hard interpretation and the second the soft interpretation. They are as follows:

The hard interpretation

The hard interpretation sees the vote as representing a fundamental shift in attitudes towards abortion since the 8th amendment of 1983. The RTE exit poll showed that only 22% of voters changed their mind on abortion in the last 5 years and only 17% of voters changed their minds during the referendum. Opinion polls in the run up to the vote showed yes with an average lead of 24%. While there was a consistent Don't Know of around 20%, the Yes core was so high that the Don't Know was not essential to passing the motion. Indeed, the fact that the Don't Know moved decisively towards Yes in the end itself a sign of how far attitudes had moved. Leo Varadkar considered this shift to be revolutionary.

Related to the hard interpretation is a view as to the meaning of the vote and how significant it was beyond the issue of abortion. Such a seismic shift on a such a high profile and controversial issue cannot be seen in isolation. The question of Repeal was just one battle in a larger war between two mutually exclusive worldviews. On the one side, there is what can be broadly called the liberal stance, and on the other side there is the conservative catholic stance. The catholic stance is not just simply a religious perspective - it also has a political dimension.

There is no coherent middle ground position. That is not the say that individual people cannot be sympathetic to both sides - there are of course catholics who like to see themselves as liberals. If they are, however, they must leave their religious views at the door. To be liberal is to see morality as a matter of individual choice (once the harm principle is observed). To be catholic requires seeing morality as universally applicable. To be secular is to support unequivocally the separation of church and state. To be catholic requires subscribing to certain core tenets that have political consequences like the right to life of the unborn.

According to the hard version, these two worldviews have been warring for decades, primarily though not exclusively through referenda, with the liberals increasingly achieving the upper hand.  The referendum then is part of a bigger narrative. The marriage referendum in 2015 was the last major battle in this war. Secularisation of the school system and referenda on blasphemy and the woman's place in the home will be the next. The two-to-one vote in favour of the 8th in 1983 as the last major catholic victory represents "peak" catholicism. The 1980s is Ireland was was perceived as a dark age. Varadkar himself described the vote as marking "the day Ireland stepped out from under the last of our shadows and into the light".  Others agree that this is about more than abortion, but see this as a cause for lament not celebration.

The soft interpretation

This version of events argues that the vote margins in both 1983 and 2018 suggest something more dramatic than was actually the case. The vote to repeal in 2018 was simply to replace the 8th amendment with a provision that the termination of pregnancy may be regulated by law. It was not a vote on the government's proposed legislation. If you start from the view that the 8th amendment itself was too extreme, then an overwhelming vote to repeal it is not in itself extreme but a conservative correction of sorts.

To support this view, the RTE exit poll for the vote showed that only 52% of voters agreed with the government's proposals to allow unrestricted abortion up to the first 12 weeks. This would suggest that a large cohort of repeal voters voted reluctantly because of the so-called hard cases and not out of a more general desire to liberalise the law. And if you combine this reading of the 2018 vote with a view that the 1983 vote exaggerated the level of "pro-life" support due to pro-amendment voters not intending the effects of the amendment in 'hard cases' such as the X case in 1992, then the transition from enactment to repeal does not seem so momentous at all.

Where the hard interpretation sees the vote as having a significance beyond the issue of abortion, as being a referendum on liberalism vs the Catholic Church, the soft interpretation avoids over-interpreting the result. Whilst there may have been ideological extremes on both sides, the moderate middle ground voted for Repeal with "a heavy heart". These voters were moved by the personal stories and accounts they heard of women travelling to Britain. Also, the No campaign was led by lay people who did not base their arguments on religion. Where the other version sees great upheaval, this one sees much latent conservatism. Just because a person may have a more liberal view on this issue does not necessarily mean that they buy into a more general liberal agenda. 

As alluded to above, there are people who happily self-identify as both liberal and Catholic. Indeed, if census figures are anything to go by, it is probable that most Irish people are like this. These people would believe that to take a stance on the issue is not to declare for one camp over another in a zero-sum culture war. Often pejoratively branded a la carte or cultural catholics, they don't harbour any particular bitterness or hostility towards the Church provided it keeps its nose out of politics.

Assessment

The RTE exit poll shows that the woman's right to choose and the life and health of the woman were the two dominant factors influencing people's votes. The hard cases were big factors too but not as prominent. 75% of voters always knew how they would vote. 52% of voters supported unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks and 38% disagreed. This is only 4% higher than the No vote, hardly indicative of a reluctant yes. Rather than a decisive middle ground flipping over on the hard cases out of a sense of "compassion", the numbers point towards a sea change in attitudes since 1983 in favour of a more liberal regime.

If we think about it, this should not come as a great surprise. Ireland generally has changed dramatically in recent decades on many levels. The most fundamental was the economic level, where the Celtic Tiger brought about new modes of behaviour completely alien to the Ireland of the past. In hindsight, it's arguably more surprising that the 8th amendment survived as long as it did. Afterall, it came from a time when contraception was something that had to be prescribed, when divorce was unconstitutional, when homosexuality was illegal. Looking at it this way, the shift in values that produced the result probably happened some time ago. The 8th was increasingly a relic from a past social order. Perhaps it took the collapse of Fianna Fail in 2011, the vanguard of nationalism, to finally clear the way for the liberal crusade of this decade.

The next question then is the significance of the vote beyond abortion. Is it correct to see this as part of a wider culture war? I don't believe it is possible to disentangle this vote from the general culture of individual freedom that has accompanied economic change in Ireland. The Celtic Tiger created a specific demand for professionals to service the increasingly complex foreign direct investment-led economy. This had numerous effects. Among them were the intense commodification of labour and the erosion of traditional gender barriers to employment.

In this context, pregnancy was increasingly seen as a potential encumbrance to a woman's full and equal participation in the workforce. The 8th was increasingly perceived as a patriarchal weaponisation of the unborn in violation of the woman's right to control her own body. It was a tool of subjugation no longer acceptable in the new Ireland. The RTE exit poll showed a correlation between class and pro-choice preferences. ABC1 voted 77% to repeal, CDE2 63% and F 53%. This would tally with the assertion that it was middle class professional women who spearheaded repeal.

Notwithstanding the above, this is a war that has effectively been over for a long time. Catholicism as a political force has been clinically dead since the 1990s. And even before that, in the 1970s and 80s, there were clear signs of decline. Liberalism is fighting its shadow. Catholicism is still deemed to exert political influence in certain areas such as blasphemy, the constitutional role of women and education. But any power here is residual and tokenistic in nature and has little effect on people's lives. At this stage, political catholicism is largely a bogeyman conjured up by liberalism to create an "us versus them" dynamic.

Conclusion

In summation, I will say the following:

- The vote shows that there has been a seismic change "revolutionary" in values. However, as Leo Varadkar said, it was the culmination of a 'quiet revolution' rather than a revolution in its own right. Middle Ireland is no longer the power broker it was.

- The vote was in essence an affirmation of liberalism, in this case expressed as the right to choose, rather than a pragmatic and reluctant vote for compassion. This liberalism should be seen critically as part and parcel of the economic transformation that occurred from the 1990s on.
- This liberalism is inherently incompatible with political Catholicism. However, political Catholicism has long ceased to be a serious force in Irish politics.