Gavan Reilly: Prepare for referendums that will be even more personal than usual

There’s an old quote attributed to Henry Kissinger, who once opined that student politics ‘was so vicious, precisely because the stakes were so small’. It’s a quote I detested when I was heavily involved in the students’ union in UCD – how could you say that things we were fighting for, like reform of an inconsistent student grant, or gentler handling of 22,000 students’ degrees as their courses were semesterised, were small?

Obviously with the passage of time I can understand what Kissinger was getting at. Much of student politics is tied up in debates about the state of the wider world – things that students are largely powerless to influence. I was once a delegate at a Union of Students in Ireland Congress where we held a very earnest 90-minute debate on whether the student movement in Ireland should formally endorse a ban on commercial whaling in the waters off Japan. Let’s be blunt: the Asian fisheries industry was hardly going to live or die based on the unresearched hot takes of 300 students in a hotel ballroom in Bettystown.

Kissinger’s point was that when you separate principle and practice, and arguments are reduced solely to principles, there is no practical restraint on how deep an argument can go. People can mount their ideological hill and set up camp, ready to die there if asked to.

This parallel crossed my mind earlier this week as campaigning on the two referendums in March officially got underway. Ahead of the Dáil formally approving the wording for the two amendments on Wednesday afternoon, the advocacy group OneFamily was calling for a Yes vote in both ballots.

The contributions at their event were sincere and heartfelt: speakers talked about their pasts as unmarried mothers, and how diluting the constitutional link between ‘marriage’ and ‘family’ would retroactively vindicate their lives in the eyes of the State. One had four children, but had only been married for two of their births; because the Constitution considers marriage to be the institution upon which the family is founded, her two older children were not considered ‘family’ to the same extent that the younger ones were.

Notable in the contributions, though, was the detachment between principle and practice. Of course the principle of equality is enormously important to those who do not enjoy it - and that a single parent might, for example, find it much harder to raise a child than someone in a double-income household. But it’s also fair to say that, when it comes to the law, the only distinction was the feeling of inequality: the structures and prejudices of society made life harder, but the law itself did not. Similarly, the constitutional decree of a woman having a non-neglectable life in the home has never been cited in court as a reason to strike down some socially progressive law.

All of which is to say: just like presidential elections, where policy is moot and personality is king, these referendums will feel – and therefore get – very personal. Be ready