Thirty years ago this week, the second referendum on divorce resulted in a wafer-thin majority in favour of the proposal to legalise the dissolution of marriage in certain specified circumstances.
Only 9,114 votes separated the yes and no votes, prompting hearty relief and resentful bile – the latter encapsulated in the response of no campaigner Úna Bean Mhic Mhathúna at the count centre. She told those celebrating victory: “G’way, ye wife-swapping sodomites.”
How to handle divorce had prompted ferocious responses since the foundation of the State. The determination a century ago to close off the possibility of petitioning parliament through a private Bill to enable a divorce led to one of poet WB Yeats’s most famous speeches.
In the Seanad in June 1925, he spoke out against what he regarded as an assault on Protestant liberties: “We against whom you have done this thing are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe.” He also insisted that if it was demonstrated that southern Ireland “is going to be governed by Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North”.
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Forty years later, in a letter to the minister for justice Brian Lenihan snr, taoiseach Seán Lemass wondered if the provisions of a Vatican Council decree on religious liberty might “permit us to change the law so as to allow divorce and remarriage for those of our citizens whose religion tolerates it”. Lenihan was told by Msgr Gerard Sheehy, then chancellor of the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, there would be “violent opposition from the hierarchy to any proposal to allow divorce in the State”.
The first divorce referendum, in 1986, was held during a decade of moral civil war; after the 1983 abortion referendum, Fine Gael TD Oliver J Flanagan boasted that the “the liberal intellectuals” would be “silenced forever”. Another Fine Gael TD, Alice Glenn, criticised some advocates for a Yes vote for divorce with such trenchancy – “those who can clearly be classified as enemies of the people” – she was forced to resign from the party. Glenn also provided the most memorable soundbite of the 1986 campaign: “Any woman voting for divorce would be like a turkey voting for Christmas”.
It is easy now to depict these various outbursts as almost comical, but they carried contemporary weight and had consequences.
Yeats’s speech was widely regarded as over the top in 1925, even by Protestants who had no appetite to campaign for divorce rights, given their own divisions on the matter, and some of his fellow Protestant senators distanced themselves from his comments. In 1986, Glenn was also deliberately stoking genuine fears about the financial consequences of divorce for women.
But it was also the case that Glenn was, as historian Terry Clavin puts it, “lampooned relentlessly by journalists”. This was partly her intention, as she “courted media martyrdom and relished provoking liberal sensibilities”.
The Catholic moral crusaders of that decade deliberately made outrageous analogies; Mhic Mhathúna, long critical of women who worked outside the home and those who encouraged that, established the Irish Housewives Union in the early 1980s and maintained in 1985 of housewives that “we’re at the same level now as the untouchables in India”.
Her comment after the 1995 referendum, therefore, represented a consistency, and as the late journalist Eddie Holt saw it, her words were “seething with a sibilance”.
But Holt was also struck by how media savvy some of the no campaigners were, and wrote of “the paradox of the modernity on display ... the No Divorce gang’s campaign manager Peter Scully barked into a mobile phone when he wasn’t tapping away on a laptop computer”.
The ongoing campaign by Enoch Burke and his family is also decidedly modern, as evidenced by their use of social media and live recordings.
But it is the ferocity of their approach and seeming desire for martyrdom that is most striking and most damaging. Those aspects, not the question of transgender rights, is what makes this saga most troubling.
This was captured in the response of Mr Justice Brian Cregan, who insisted Enoch Burke be returned to prison for contempt of court.
In the High Court, the judge referred to Burke’s continued appearanceon the premises of Wilson’s Hospital School as “a baleful and malign presence – an intruder, stalking the school, its teachers and its pupils”, and that his “aggression, unregulated anger and lack of self-control, combined with his strategy of confrontation, make him a potential danger to pupils and teachers of the school”.
The Burkes are usually described as “fundamentalist Christians”, prompting another reminder from history: in 1957, Irish trade unionist John Conroy, president of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, lamented how “nowhere in the world was there a country where so much Christianity was taught but so little practised ... the practical application of Christian teaching is put aside when selfish personal interests are involved”.
