Success is still some distance away for same-sex marriage referendum

YESTERDAY’S cabinet meeting committed the Government to holding a referendum on same-sex marriage.

It is 30 years since homosexuality was decriminalised. It was just three years since civil partnerships became possible for gay and lesbian people. Thousands of years in the reckoning and a single generation in the making, an astonishing story is unfolding and chapters are still to be told.

But change is not inevitable. Most of what is promised in fact never happens. In 30 years we had a dot.com bubble that burst and a Celtic Tiger sent stinking to the taxidermist. A referendum to enable divorce passed only with the slimmest of majorities and then only after a previous one was defeated. The millstone of the eight amendment to the constitution prohibiting abortion, but in the X Case judgement actually enabling it if only for the suicidal, remains in our constitution. Savita Halappanavar had the misfortune to live in a country resistant to change. Her death provoked self-satisfying outrage but no change to allow a risk to the health of a woman as a basis for the termination of a viable foetus.