The Irish cultural exception

So we Irish are going to get swelled heads -- for the second time in a week, Blogistan is alive with discussions of the relevance of the much-amended Irish constitution for the Bush proposal to ban gay marriage. This time it's Atrios pointing to a discussion by Irish sociologist (it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it) Kieran Healy of the Republic's very reluctant introduction of divorce in the mid 1990s. Healy notes the incredibly tight margin of victory for the amendment and argues that if there is a slippery slope with liberalising marriage laws, then the Irish No voters were operating much closer to where that slope begins than the opponents of gay marriage. Which is sort of like saying that if one is against nuclear power, it would have useful to have spoken up in opposition the first time that man rubbed two sticks together.

But indeed one of the interesting things about the introduction of divorce in Ireland was the closeness of the vote. Some of which clearly reflects the innate conservatism of Irish society. But there are two other factors that deserve mention.

One is partisan political cycnicism. There were two attempts to introduce divorce in the Republic, the failed amendment of 1986 and the successful one of 1995. It is not a coincidence that both occurred during rare periods of opposition for the Republic's Institutional Revolutionary Party, Fianna Fail. Fianna Fail always takes their periods away from their rightful place in power very badly, and opposition quickly crosses the line into obstructionism. Notwithstanding the usefulness of divorce to some senior FF politicians, they opposed the amendment outright in 1986. And while supporting it in 1995, their campaign featured those two Fianna Fail stalwarts, Nod and Wink, in which an amendment defeat would have been a useful black eye for the government.

The other factor in the close vote has reflected a general contrarian tendency of the Irish electorate in recent years, if anything a refreshing tendency to say that if a bunch of guys in suits are for it, we're agin it. This was definitely the case with the referenda on closer European integration -- the Republic is unusual in that many of our fellow EU members simply present the latest steps towards a more perfect union as a fait accompli to the public, while in the Republic, there's actually, like, a popular vote on it. This was the source of some chaos a few years ago (since resolved).

As for whatever slippery slope the country got on by allowing divorce, the only apparent evidence is that Irish weddings have gotten way more trashy.