What exactly will we be voting on?

So a referendum on same sex marriage is being put before the people who never asked for it on the basis of a vote by a Constitutional Convention made up of 66 randomly selected citizens, two of whom happened to have been Labour local government candidates, a third a chairman of a Fine Gael party branch.

Even more astonishingly, that same random selection threw up a married couple and a pair of neighbours. Each pair of these representatives of the citizenry of Ireland were marked by an experienced politician who was, almost to a man or woman, strongly in favour of same sex marriage.

To give a sense of the bias at work just consider some of the key politicians who were involved in the process. Among them were Ivana Bacik, Jerry Buttimer, John Lyons, Ciara Conway, Charles Flanagan, Frances Fitzgerald and Anne Ferris. Putting it mildly, it could not be said of anyone of them that they came to the convention with an open mind to hear the experts and lobby groups give their inputs. Yes, the “experts”.