Constitution doesn’t reflect reality of modern living

AMERICAN politicians regularly — and often hilariously — describe their country as the “greatest democracy in the world”, despite the fact a president can just squeak election in terms of real votes but win a landslide in the electoral college; despite the fact the balance of powers between Congress and the president are such that the system often seizes up; and despite the fact that new laws are sometimes not made by the legislature but by the US Supreme Court.

Such is the American faith in the wisdom of their founding fathers that they will regularly go to court to decide what George Washington might have thought of Super-PACs or people being allowed to keep assault rifles in their homes. Men who are dead for hundreds of years are being asked to make judgements about a world they would find utterly bewildering.

But the yanks are not unique in this regard: most republics place an inordinate amount of faith in their constitutions, regarding them as constant, inviolate and wholesome: a sort of legislative chicken pie. You can tinker with the ingredients slightly, but it will always be chicken pie: and everyone always will like it.

Let’s torture that metaphor to death: what about 50 years from now? When everyone is vegan and eating chicken is regarded as barbaric? The point being that human societies, and how they organise themselves are constantly changing — and that rate of change is speeding up. And it seems to be increasingly difficult for a fixed document like a constitution to keep up. The US constitution has been around since 1789 and been amended twenty seven times. We’ve only had ours since 1937 and we’ve tried to change it forty times.

We’ve passed amendments which turned out to have the opposite effect of what was intended; we’ve had to re-take votes because Europe didn’t like the result the first time around. And we’ve added in bits because it was deemed politically unacceptable to take bits out.

The amendment we’ve just voted in is, in part, intended to balance up other parts of the constitution that stress the primacy of the family in Irish life. But no one seems to have asked whether such matters should be included in a constitution at all.

If the family is a fundamental unit of Irish society this is a result of custom and practice by Irish people. The constitution won’t affect that either way. All the rights and protections can be given by legislation without the constitution mentioning the family at all. It’s far easier for the Oireachtas to keep up with how we define what a family is.

Our constitution still refers to ‘the mother in the home’ when the reality is it’s increasingly likely to be the father in the home. Or the two fathers, or two mothers. Just as a family still loves the gay son or the divorced daughter, so too should the family of our nation.