30June 2015
T
HE marriage referendum was
a roller-coaster. The reports of
thousands of Irish taking
boats and flights home to vote
in the marriage referendum
were heart-lifting. Ursula Halligan’s
revelation in the last week of the mar-
riage-referendum campaign that she
had hidden her sexuality from every-
one, including at times herself was
heart-breaking. She cited the referen-
dum campaign as the reason she finally
found the bravery to come out. We can
only assume that she was relieved at the
response and delighted at the result of
the referendum. The referendum gave
popular approval to what we had
already known: that Ireland and its
people are decent and kind. Few who
witnessed it will forget the happy, open
and emotional atmosphere in Ireland on
the weekend of the result.
But there’s a reason why Ireland is the
first country in the world to approve
same-sex marriage by popular vote. Not
many countries want to have to go to the
people every time they want to change
their laws, even constitutional law. As
well as being expensive and slow it may
cause more harm than good.
The referendum last month has prob-
ably settled the issue of same-sex
marriage. But that’s because it con-
firmed a measure that was on the path
society was already following. There
was no such settlement in the UK when a
couple of years ago it rejected a change
to its electoral laws. Many, from UKIP to
the Greens, are calling to revisit that
decision.
And referendum certainly hasn’t set-
tled the issue of Scottish independence.
In fact the referendum has accentuated
divisions within Scottish society. In the
marriage referendum one Irish Times
columnist proclaimed to be “heartsick
at what we have witnessed in these past
weeks”. Rather than unite the country it
has exposed and deepened a division.
This isn’t surprising. This is what
Parliamentary democracy should deliver the small steps that reflect
the incremental moves of society. By Eoin O’Malley
Referendums often
give the wrong result
Also in this section:
Ireland in South America 33
Mobility grants 34
Ashers discrimination 35
Mannix Flynn’s resignation 36
Dunnes beats them all 38
Dáil privilege 41
Grangegorman evictions 42
POLITICS
Yes No
Whatever
June 2015 31
concerns of those opposed to marriage
equality.
The most righteous proponents on
either side saw the morality of their
position but made no attempt to speak
to or hear the other side. As the social
psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out,
“[Morality] binds us into ideological
teams that fight each other as though
the fate of the world depended on our
side winning each battle. It blinds us to
the fact that each team is composed of
good people who have something
important to say”.
The No side was dishonest. It didn’t
want to say that it thinks homosexuality
immoral, so it muddied waters with
children and surrogacy. This appeals to
those who are uncomfortable about the
speed and direction Ireland is moving.
The Yes side was honest in its frame
about equality and fairness. This pushes
buttons for liberals, but does nothing to
convince for conservatives. The Yes side
seemed to be saying ‘This is Ireland,
your one is dead’ and didn’t care about
bringing people along with it. Instead
conservatives could have been per-
suaded by emphasising respect.
Battle lines had been drawn when the
campaign started with a call for a
‘homophobia watchdog’; we were never
going to come to a genuine understand-
ing of the other side. It was one where
genuine doubters were called names and
increasingly illiberal stances were
assumed by many of either persuasion.
We didn’t learn much, except to hate the
other side.
The media are also to blame. They
stopwatch the different sides, and pick
sometimes-extreme proponents of each
view. This is the John Waters-effect. We
like to hear strong opinions not rational
ones. Some lawyers took a sceptical
view of the children’s rights referen-
dum. They wondered aloud whether it
was needed at all because all these
rights were already implied in judg-
ments. But they weren’t clearly on one
side or the other so instead of hearing
these views, which may have sparked a
genuine debate, we heard barely articu-
late nonsense from people who seemed
to think that the state was preparing to
round up our children.
The other problem is that we tend to
be more moved by emotional rhetoric
than analytical argument. Halligan’s
intervention, as with most of the inter-
ventions of the gay community and
their families recounting their fears,
was highly emotive and very effective.
happens in referendums. This is because
as Paul Romer observes in a recent issue
of the American Economic Review:
“Politics does not yield to a broadly
shared consensus. It has to yield to a
decision, whether or not a consensus
prevails. As a result, political institu-
tions create incentives for participants
to exaggerate disagreements between
factions. Words that are evocative and
ambiguous better serve the factional
interest than words that are analytical
and precise”.
Romer was talking about politics gen-
erally, but the referendum process is
even more guilty than representative
democracy of incentivising division.
Because referendums offer only an
either or; they create binaries whereas
issues are on a continuum. Instead of a
Seanad referendum on its retention or
abolition we could have had a debate on
the nature of the second chamber we
might actually want.
There is a lot of shouting in parlia-
ment the main purpose of which is
signalling to voters that the politicians
care about an issue; but behind the
scenes, in committees and, yes, in the
Dáil bar politicians talk and share expe-
riences (sometimes even evidence) and
they work together usually in a slow and
sloppy way to make things better.
Productive collaboration is com-
pletely ditched in electoral campaigns,
as politicians accentuate the differences
between them and the other lot. That’s
fine in the marketplace for competent
politicians: you want to see how politi-
cians perform under pressure.
In referendums finding the best policy
is important, but extreme positions are
taken in an attempt to win. I experi-
enced it directly when I was involved in
the Seanad referendum campaign, on
the side in favour of abolition. In
response to what we thought was fanci-
ful fear-mongering about democracy in
danger, we exaggerated our rhetoric, to
talk of the Seanad as a danger to democ-
racy. In fact neither contention was
true. The referendum was pointless, and
neither outcome was going to change
anything very much. I started out with
that position, but campaigning moved
me towards an extreme.
In moving to the extremes we divide
the country, and in having a referendum
on marriage equality we missed an
opportunity to talk to each other about
the problems gay people have, well
beyond the issue of marriage, and listen
to the – we have to assume - genuine
We know from opinion research that
emotional appeals are far more effective
for campaigning than cognitive ones.
But is that a good way to make policy?
In the marriage referendum there was a
race to see who could pull at our heart-
strings most. Children were paraded t,
but it hardly helped us make a rational,
informed decision. We might have
agreed with the emotions that got this
referendum passed, but emotion is also
responsible for the bigotry and preju-
dice of populist nationalists in Europe
and beyond.
Because humans are easy targets for
emotional blackmail, campaigners in
referendums try to frame the referen-
dum to suit them. And it is easier for us
to default to emotional decision-making
when the issues are complex. The
Lisbon Treaty was a long bit of time-
serving nonsense that no one in their
right mind could have read, still less
fully understood. But our constitutional
law expects us to be competent to judge
whether we sign up to it. Of course we
aren’t competent, and nor should we be.
Instead either side creates a caricature;
where the nightmare of abortion and
conscription are pitted against the nir-
vana of jobs and growth.
The Lisbon Treaty might be excep-
tional. Most research shows we can
learn a lot during a referendum cam-
paign. But why do we decide that some
issues are important to acquaint our-
selves with and not others”? This
magazine has often suggested that
property rights determine so much in
this society that they justify popular
scrutiny and a vote. Whatever the out-
come. An obvious pressing issue in the
last eight years was whether we
assumed the debts of private banks?
This big decision was made by cabinet
with the approval of the Oireachtas. We
didn’t really get a say. It would have
been too difficult to put such an issue to
the people – it’s not one thing or the
other – and surely no one would like to
deal with a country that had such a
cumbersome decision-making process.
Let’s assume we could do it quickly AND
we understood what was at stake, we
still often just use the referendum as a
plebiscite on the government. The
Seanad referendum was most likely lost
because the government was
unpopular.
Part of the problem might be to do
with the way we do referendums in Ire-
land. Referendums give a great deal of
power to the agenda setter – the one
Referendums
are biased in
favour of the
status quo
because, as
we’ve seen,
it is easy to
create doubt
in the minds
of risk-averse
voters
“
Dr Eoin O’Malley is
the Director of the
MSc programme in
Public Policy at the
School of Law and
Government, DCU.