Failures of the Yes-Yes campaign, especially those of the Government, are writ large across the emphatic result of Friday’s referendum. Complexity isn’t counted alongside cast ballots, but there are layers of it within the result. Here are some of the lessons.
1. Listen to Citizens’ Assemblies
In 2014, the constitutional convention made recommendations on Article 41.2. In 2018, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice and Equality was already struggling with wording. The Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality concluded that Article 41.2 should be deleted, replaced with gender-neutral language and that the State be obliged to take measures to support care within the home and wider community. The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Gender Equality ratified the Citizens’ Assembly recommendation.
Citizens’ Assemblies are democratic, detail-orientated, and have proven to accurately reflect the desires of the broader public. The Government arrogantly went for different wording, ignoring the outcomes of processes pointing them in the right direction. This was a significant and unforgivable error. It put the Yes-Yes argument in a weak position: they were offering something better than what’s there, but not perfect. This was never going to be a winning argument for a discerning electorate.
2. Follow the strategy
When Irish people look to the chaos of Brexit, we like to repeat our lessons on how to run referendums on big issues — build a movement, have legislation prepared and ensure the consequences are clear so people know what they’re voting on. The Government did none of this. Neither was the architecture of a grassroots movement in place to do the job instead. Votes are won on doorsteps and there was no notable canvassing infrastructure.
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This was a collapse in basic referendum campaigning principles. The Government fell for hubris over strategy and superficiality over substance. The immediate plunge into legalistic arguments at the campaign’s outset created an entanglement that never unravelled.
3. Use strong and clear messaging
The rights argument was lost within a debate about definitions. Most voters came to the campaign late, encountering garbled wording and confusing arguments. This allows hypotheticals to triumph. Within a campaign, strong, clear counterarguments exposing red herrings and fear-based messaging are essential.
Without effective countering, you end up in the worst possible campaign scenario short of a scandal: retaining the status quo becomes the broad consensus and your proposed “change” appears problematic. The movement advocating for No votes of all kinds in the campaign’s closing fortnight – albeit fragmented — was diverse. Broad movements tend to win, even if they include contradictory forces. Narrow ones that cannot pull in passionate and varied voices stay siloed and in this case lost ground in multiple directions.
There were some surprising alliances, such as the Equality Not Care entity including the Aontú politician Michael O’Dowd. Aontú is right-wing and anti-choice. There appeared to be little appetite within the Yes-Yes campaign to fight hard for fear of causing division. The Yes-Yes campaign struck the same tone at the end as it did at the outset, just fainter. Its messaging did not evolve over the campaign and ultimately amounted to a weak rallying call. The National Women’s Council was left carrying the load, hung out to dry by the Government’s poor wording and lacklustre campaigning.
4. Government politicians did not connect
I know a few people whose switch from Yes-Yes to Yes-No was solidified by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s interview on The Six O’Clock Show. His tacit insistence that his privilege is a default experience rankles people, as does his habit of filtering everything through a neoliberal lens.
All Government politicians were poor campaigners throughout, but at some stage, someone in Fine Gael is going to have to point out the obvious that their party leader appears much more adept at losing votes — of all kinds — than gaining them. He is an unpopular figure among progressives, feminists, the political-activist ecosystem within the LGBTQ+ community, and across the left and centre-left, yet was trying to sell what was framed as progressive constitutional change. This does not compute. If you can’t win votes, what are you for?
The arguments for Yes and No in the referendums, explained
A referendum win would have put a sheen on their upcoming local and European election campaigns for the Coalition parties. But Fine Gael especially faces a trouncing in the locals and will now encounter that on the back of this loss.
5. It is not clear who the real winners were
Ireland has not suddenly re-endorsed McQuaidism. The vote was nuanced. But the Catholic right and far-right will claim a victory that has multiple authors. On the most recent anti-immigrant protest I attended in Dublin, loaded with far-right agitators and activists from fringe far-right parties, No-No messaging was prominent. On Saturday, Gavin Pepper — a man who encouraged people to descend on Dublin city centre last November on the day riots would erupt — snapped a selfie with what he described as “the legend himself”, Michael McDowell, though there is no suggestion McDowell knew who Pepper was.
Yes-Yes voters were no more invested in marginalising people with disabilities than Yes-No voters were suddenly big fans of bishops. Advocates for disability rights and carers deserve support and solidarity. People listened to their arguments. Those calling for a Yes-No vote did not want regressive forces bolstered. But intention is different from consequence and that is one of the outcomes of this referendum, even if it is not the desired one for many voters.
Ultimately, the late Yes-No vote was small. The No vote in the Care referendum was just 6.2 per cent more than the Family amendment No vote. A crude subtraction of that 6.2 per cent is simplistic, but if the Yes-No call had cut through, the Family Amendment should have passed. The vast majority of people did not vote Yes-No. They voted No-No. The passion of sentiment — a turnout driver — was clearly with a No-No vote, which must be respected.