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Kevin ClarkeMay 22, 2015

UPDATE: A referendum approving an amendment to the Irish constitution which will legalize same sex marriage has passed by a large margin, as early polls had predicted. The only surprise is how well the "yes" vote did across all segments of Irish society.

Many had predicted a generational divide, but support for "yes" cut across age and gender, geography and income, early results showed.


Ireland appears on the verge tonight of becoming the first nation to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. Before the public today was a referendum that would endorse or deny a proposed amendment to the constitution of Ireland to mandate provision for same-sex marriage. The referendum’s vote counting will begin Saturday morning in Ireland.

The Catholic Church in Ireland has opposed the measure though a number of individual priests have gone on the record encouraging a “yes” vote. Last month a spokesperson for the church even suggested that Ireland's Catholic bishops might decide that their priests should decline to perform civil aspects of weddings if the referendum on same-sex marriage is passed, meaning couples wanting to get married in the church would have to attend a separate civil ceremony. "If the referendum is passed, the church's view and the state's view of marriage will be radically different," he explained. "It's reasonable that the bishops may decide to separate the two," referring to church and civil ceremonies. About 60 percent of the marriages in Ireland are celebrated in Catholic churches.

Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin took the unusual step on May 6 of explaining his “no” position: “For me the fundamental question is about the complementarity of men and women, of male and female, in the nature of humanity…. Why do humans exist as male and female? Is that distinction simply marginal? Is it simply a social construct?

“One of the big challenges in human rights theory is a tendency by some to absolutize an individual right, overlooking the fact that all rights can only be exercised within the context of the right of others and in an understanding of relationships that exist within society,” he said. “We are not isolated individuals. That we exist as male and female is not a marginal dimension of being human.”

Responding to those who argue the church in Ireland should restrain itself to the “religious” sphere and stay out of secular discussions such as same-sex marriage, the archbishop said, “We should not forget that so much of what is cherished as good in secular society is, in fact, the fruit of Christian culture.”

Polls running up to the referendum today showed a majority of voters favored a constitutional amendment to expand the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. The margins are wide with “yes” votes running as high as 75 percent to 27 percent support for “no” in one survey. Despite that gulf, some pollsters, perhaps chastened by how badly they predicted the outcome of the recent U.K. elections, insist voter turnout will still be key.

Young people may support same-sex marriages by overwhelming percentages, but it is often older voters, trending more to “no,” who actually turn in their ballots. Reports late Friday night indicate a historic voter turnout in Ireland. According to the BBC, in Dublin, Limerick and Waterford turnout was higher than 60 percent of the electorate, while in Cork, Carlow, Kilkenny, Donegal, Tipperary, Kerry and Galway it was above 50 percent. Ireland does not allow voting by absentee ballot and in recent days thousands of Irish citizens had been streaming into the country from overseas to take part in the vote.

The apparent popular indifference to the church’s resistance to the “yes” vote is another indication of how far the cultural reach of the church has fallen in Ireland and how quickly the civil rights demands of gay and lesbian couples have come to be accepted by the wider society. The voting public similarly ignored the church’s resistance to the legalization of divorce in Ireland in 1995.

Commentators attribute the church’s stunning fall from grace in the Irish public’s eyes to the years of social unraveling—the church had once been a more-or-less all-powerful, unifying cultural force in the Republic—compelled by the relentlessly horrendous clerical sex abuse crisis and the cover-up of the same by church leaders. The extension of marriage rights and other social privileges to gay and lesbian people has been accelerating at a remarkable pace around the world. That phenomenon has been accompanied by a clear generational divergence. Homosexuality was legalized less than 20 years ago in Ireland; now a generation coming of age in Ireland seems genuinely perplexed by their elders’ resistance to the idea of same-sex marriages.

Though Ireland would be the first nation to endorse same sex marriage as a civil right by a national referendum, 20 other nations, many in Western Europe, have already legislatively endorsed legal same-sex marriages. Netherlands lead the way in 2000. Ireland’s nearest neighbors—Wales, England and Scotland—already allow same-sex marriage. In the United States, just 13 states maintain a ban on same-sex unions and the issue may soon be resolved on a national level by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling expected in June.

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
Carlos Orozco
8 years 10 months ago
It is stunning to verify how any civilization can fall in one generation. Centuries of Catholic teachings have been put aside to follow the shallow, dangerous and false promises of gender ideology. A treasure has been traded for a lie.
ed gleason
8 years 10 months ago
The Irish are taught about their history of being repressed. so they vote against repression .. American/irish have forgotten where they came from so they therefore are able to get anchor jobs on FOX news
Leo Cleary
8 years 10 months ago
Ireland has chosen to catch up with the human race. Although the Irish bishops and some Irish Catholics are not in favor of same sex marriage, the referendum would not have passed so resoundingly if most Catholics did not vote for it. Law usually takes some years to catch up with the convictions of a people. It seems that happened in Ireland this week. Now the question is how long will it take the Catholic leadership of the country to accept reality and offer viable spiritual assistance to those human beings in love with someone of their own gender? What the Irish Catholic Church needs to avoid is the sorrow operating in so many American dioceses. That the children and relatives of loving and faithful gay couples feel obliged to leave the Church because those they love are being condemned by the rhetoric of some bishops. If we can all learn from of mistakes then the Irish bishops can lean to accept with mercy the will of the majority of its faithful.
Tim O'Leary
8 years 10 months ago
This is a sad day for the future children of Ireland. Of the 3.2 million eligible to vote, 1.2 million voted for gay marriage. Like much of the self-centered western world, modern Ireland has shifted the primary reason for marriage away from the care of children to the fulfillment of adults, and this vote is the complete severance. Notice that children are secondary or lower considerations in these laws: the introduction of divorce (1995), a right to kill one's preborn child abroad (1992), a right to abort for mental distress (2013), and now this. Here are two gay men who raised concern about the impact on children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6HD8KLQBvA. They were of course lambasted as homophobes. Of course, Ireland is not doing anything different than the rest of the West. So many self-identifying Catholics have listened to a different drum since the sex revolution of the 1960s, whether it is contraception, abortion, divorce or homosexuality. Their faith is no longer primary when considering moral life. And, it is also affecting even doctrine, where ignorance also plays a big part (say on the Real Presence or other doctrines). Archbishop Martin says the Irish Church needs a reality check. He is right. But, so does every individual Catholic. They need to ask themselves if they really believe anymore that the Church teaches the truth on faith and morals.
Tom Fields
8 years 10 months ago
The Marriage relationship between a man and a woman, a Sacramental Marriage, is God's chosen model--to show His love for the world----(St. John Paul II). He must be crying in Heaven.
John Wotherspoon
8 years 10 months ago
In all the pre and post referendum talk, virtually nothing has been said about the medical side of male gay marriage. See my article at top of www.v2catholic.com - "Elephants in men's room"
Michael Corrado
8 years 10 months ago
To those who commented complaining that children are being ignored in this rush to honor individual rights: That might be a sound complaint -- might be -- against any other background than the history of the Church's treatment of children in Ireland.
Tim O'Leary
8 years 10 months ago
Michael - it would be a double injury if failures to protect children in the past nullified the obligation to protect them in the future. I'm sure you would not want pro-abortion activists to abdicate their responsibility to oppose sexual child abuse just because they defended the ultimate child abuse in the womb. Recall that the Irish State and the Irish laity have been equally implicated in the failure to prevent abuse in Ireland in the past. Now they are doing it again. Only a few years ago, the liberal position was that fathers who avoided their responsibilities to their natural-born children were "dead-beat" and that the use of surrogate moms was an abuse of both the mother and the child. And adoption was seen as an altruistic response to children who could not be cared for by their natural parents. How quickly things change - all in the name of honoring adult sexual rights. Perhaps, you didn't watch the youtube linked to below.
Anne Danielson
8 years 10 months ago
A Baptized Catholic who denies that God Is The Author of Love, Life, and Marriage, is an apostate. What we are witnessing is not polarization in The Catholic Church but a Great Falling Away. There is no division in The Body of Christ. You are either with Christ or against Him.

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