Referendum result hasn’t settled debate on contentious issue By Maura Adshead

HERE’S one for the pub quiz.

How many referenda have there been since the foundation of the State? Aha, I hear you say: do you mean the number of days that we’ve gone out and voted on the constitution? Or do you mean the actual number of amendments? Or are you only referring to the amendments that were passed? Then the answer is 30, 34 or 25.

Maybe. I don’t know. I hate these kinds of questions. I hate even more that people think I ought to know this stuff. Do I look like a train spotter? Anyway, the answer is quite a lot, and certainly more than we’ve needed. After all, now that the last one is finally behind us, what did the result tell us — apart from the blindingly obvious — that we didn’t know already? For those returning from vacation on Mars: the blindingly obvious was that the answer was yes, and the turnout was low. The result was that the majority of those who voted, voted for something that the Government wanted, that all the main political parties wanted, and that they agreed with also. And no, I didn’t suggest that anyone was particularly happy or enthusiastic about this.

So how much did this exercise in democratic reassurance cost us all? I’ve tried looking it up but I can’t find a single reference to the cost of referenda in Ireland. Which is odd, since we’ve had quite a few and the last one was all about the financial mess we were in. The only figures I could find were for general elections, which the Standards in Public Office Commission estimated at around €9.3m in the 2011 election — a decrease of almost 16% on the figure reported for 2007. I’m sure that referenda do not cost as much as elections, so our last one probably only amounted to a few million. And what price can one put on democracy? Whatever the cost, I’m sure it was worth it. I certainly feel much better for it.

Well, apart from just a few little niggles.

I was wondering, for example, what was the opportunity cost of the last referendum? Could the money have been better spent? Could the time have been better spent? Might all that energy have been diverted into pressing issues like healthcare, education, pensions, jobs? In what ways are we better off for this vast expenditure of time, money and efforts? Did it bring greater clarity to the debate? There were almost six weeks where our politicians were engaged in the campaign. It was great. The Taoiseach even turned up to the milk market in Limerick. It was a pity that due to a regular Saturday morning swim lesson, he just missed my family, but there’ll surely be another referendum on constitutional change and he might get a chance to catch us then. I mean no disrespect to our Taoiseach. There was a referendum campaign on and it was expected that he would campaign vigorously — like everyone else.

None of us can consider this result conclusive because this issue is not yet concluded. So it was just like an over-elaborate opinion poll, which, like most opinion polls, was interpreted in different ways by the different sides, who were, for the most part, on the same side. Which means what exactly? And there’s that niggle again. Because I really can’t see what we all achieved in the last referendum.

Did we improve the system of government? There are mixed views on this. One view is that by repeatedly holding referenda, we undermine the powers of the Oireachtas, because we take away the expectation that our national assembly will exercise its representative function and debate issues in detail on our behalf.

This function is already skewed somewhat in the Irish case since the McKenna decision in the Supreme Court in 1995, making it unconstitutional for the Government of Ireland to spend taxpayers’ money promoting only one side of the argument in referendum campaigns. This led to the setting up of the Referendum Commission, and the re-location of a lot of our national debates out of the Dáil, where regular majorities still predominate, and into the media, where the 50/50 rules are rigorously applied.

Another view is that it is hard to claim a loss of power for the Dáil, when power never fully resided there in the first place. Even before the McKenna case, our politicians showed an alarming proclivity for ‘going back to the people’ instead of just getting on with the job of government. The abortion referenda are a perfect example of this. The first abortion referendum, in 1983, was held entirely at the behest of a collection of anti-abortion groups, who lobbied both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the 1980s. The proposal was not in response to any perceived threat of the introduction of abortion into Ireland. Ironically, this possibility only materialised later, in 1992, when the Supreme Court interpreted the amendment to allow abortion in some limited cases (where, for example, the mother was a traumatised and suicidal child rape victim).

The controversy about when an abortion might or might not be legal, and how such a legal entitlement might be availed of led to another referendum in 1992. Voters were offered three amendments giving: the right to travel for services legally available elsewhere; the right to information about services legally available elsewhere; and the right to an abortion. The result was an overwhelming agreement that pregnant Irish women could go somewhere else for abortions. Few in the Dáil seemed keen to push for legislation to support this decision. So the status quo ante remained until 2002, when another referendum was held.

This time, the legislative provisions to add such a complex set of conditions about when medical interventions might or might not be appropriate for pregnant women were contained in a supplementary Act, which would follow if the amendment was passed. It was narrowly defeated and Irish voters sent back this complex problem to the Dáil. Still no legislation was produced.

Perhaps when all the fuss about the financial crisis dies down, we might have a fourth go at a referendum on abortion and see if we can’t find a way to put an extremely complex set of arguments about the medical care of pregnant women and the moral responsibility towards underage rape victims into a formula where we can all agree on a simple yes or no answer. You think not? You think that might be a ridiculous waste of our time and a job better left to expert medics and lawyers? Evidence from opinion polls — both the usual ones and the over-elaborate ones that our regular referenda have become — suggest that whilst most Irish people are not comfortable with abortion, they also recognise that sometimes difficult and regrettable decisions must be taken. And in a representative system of democracy, that is what we elect our politicians to do.

So what did the result of the last referendum (and a few others before it) tell us? There are very few politically complex issues can be adequately dealt with by a yes or no answer. We cannot have referenda on complicated questions of policy without a necessary dumbing down of the debate or a re-framing of the debate in a way that facilitates a simple aggregation of yes or no answers. Ask yourself: are you happy with the outcome of the last referendum? If you can’t answer with a simple yes or no, I’ve made my point!

* Maura Adshead is Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration in the University of Limerick