Just a few years ago, even the shrewdest bookmaker would have offered long odds against Ireland becoming the first national electorate to formally approve of same-sex marriage — previous countries have introduced it by parliamentary fiat. Had you asked for a double bet, on the prospect of a higher percentage of voters supporting marriage equality than had supported the Good Friday agreement (61 per cent versus 56), a small wager would have made enough money to secure you a long and happy retirement.
In James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus complains that “When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.” Stephen vows to escape from the confinements of “nationality, language, religion” in order to achieve personal authenticity. In the century since those words were written Dedalus’s cri de coeur has resonated with millions of others, in scores of countries that retain rigidly traditional notions of broad abstractions like ‘traditional marriage’, despite modernity’s increasingly broad embrace of diversity and personal freedom. Last week’s vote tore a large and likely irreparable opening in at least one of these nets, definitively marking the emergence of a country that while still, by several measures, is socially conservative – abortion is still illegal – is no longer reflexively traditional. In the words of the novelist Joseph O’Connor the vote allowed Ireland “to consign one outmoded version of itself to the past.”
The result was also notable for other, smaller reasons. All major political parties approved of the measure; support was distributed with near-perfect uniformity – only one of the country’s 43 constituencies voted against the amendment, and the common divergence between rural and urban attitudes didn’t seem to apply. In part that was because the vote was preceded by heartfelt personal testimonies from public figures who spoke about their changes of heart on the question. Prominent among them was the former president Mary McAleese, a devout Catholic, who spoke with unprecedented candour about the acceptance of her gay son.
Almost as impressive as the margin of victory (1.2 million aginst 734,000) was the grace with which the traditionalists accepted their defeat. Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, called the result “a reality check” and said that the church could not afford to move ahead with “a sense of denial.” Instead of hailing the vote as a victory in a culture war – as it would have been in the USA – Joseph O’Connor reads it as a sign of wider societal change as the country comes to terms with “lamentable political failure, the decline of church power in the wake of the child abuse scandals, the growth of education and mass media, the collapse of discredited certainties.” He suggests that it expresses a “multitude of private solidarities” in a country “no longer willing to act the part of obedient little Ireland, but increasingly at peace with the diverse society it is, unbothered by anyone else’s images.”
Oscar Wilde, another Irish writer, once observed that “Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.” That insight is often lost on politicians and religious and moral crusaders who pursue ideals with little sense of how they intersect with our private experience. Marriage, too, is a concept, underpinned by individual love. Since this quality is not confined by sexual orientation – or, indeed by any other facet of identity, sexual or otherwise – there is no defensible reason for not redefining the institution to take account of our broader understanding and tolerance of human diversity. The civility and grace with which Ireland has managed this transition should be noted by every democratic society that hopes to get rid of outmoded and disabling traditions of its own.
