Gavan Reilly: Language, why it matters, and the referendums in six weeks

I have a daughter with autism. I have an autistic daughter. I have a daughter who is autistic.

Those three sentences might all read like they’re saying the same thing. Their general meaning is the same. But within each sentence lies a nuanced difference.

There was a time we in Ireland referred to people as ‘handicapped’. Indeed, there was a time before that when people who were incapable of speaking for themselves, or who could not communicate their thinking to others, fell within the basket of “lunacy”. Some remnants of that insensitive language still survive in law: although the law around decision-making for those with intellectual disabilities was overhauled in 2015, some aspects still survive from the horribly titled Lunacy Regulation (Ireland) Act of 1871.

Over time we’ve realised that language like this is dehumanising, or exclusionary, or doesn’t include as many people as it should. Instead of speaking of people being ‘handicapped’, we began to talk about ‘the disabled’. In time that language also gave way to discussion of ‘people with disabilities’. What’s the difference? Talking about someone as a ‘disabled person’ implies that the disability is the most important thing about them, or that their very existence is tainted or diminished by it. Labelling someone as a ‘disabled person’ can sound like you’re saying they’re some kind of second-class person. A ‘person with a disability’ is, first and foremost, a person.

Before my daughter’s diagnosis I presumed the same logic would follow when it came to people with a diagnosis of autism too. I imagined they would prefer to be considered as ‘people with autism’ - to put the person first, rather than their diagnosis. What I’ve learned is that this presupposes their thinking. It’s not that they need to be thought of as a person first, with their autism secondary – it’s that being autistic is such a fundamental part of their being that it’s not something they’re ‘with’. It’s a trait, not a condition. They are autistic, just like someone might be musical or intelligent or fair-skinned or ginger. So they’re not ‘people with autism’, they are ‘autistic people’.

At this point you’re probably wondering why I’m banging on about something which is simultaneously so personal yet so random.

As I write this, I realise that on a subconscious level the idea might have come to mind because my daughter’s diagnosis came two years ago this week. On 20 January 2022 I went on the Virgin Media News at 8 to report that NPHET (remember them?) had recommended the indefinite lifting of almost all the pandemic-era restrictions. Having given some good news to the country, I got back into the car and resumed a Zoom call with the polite and patient psychologist delivering his assessment. More consciously, though, it’s been on my mind because of the referendums we’re due to have in six weeks’ time and some of what we might hear in the course of campaigning.

The evolution of language I mentioned is the sort of thing that might previously have been dismissed as “political correctness”, or more dismissively as ‘PC nonsense’. I understand that instinct. These are the words I use to describe these people, you might say, and I’ve always used them, and nobody has ever complained before. Having someone come along to police your language might naturally get your back up. I don’t mean any harm. Depending on how forcefully your language is challenged, you might get so defensive that you stand your ground almost out of spite. How dare someone tell me what words I use when I’m merely thinking to myself?

Political correctness is, however, really just a fancypants label for ‘words which are chosen thoughtfully so as to minimise any unintended offence’. That’s all it is. The reason people aren’t labelled as ‘handicapped’ any more is because people with disabilities have told us the term is hurtful to them; that it carries the air of an impediment and not merely of a difference. It’s the same reason why nobody in good conscience would use the word ‘r****ded’ any more.

How is that relevant to the referendums in March? Because in the last few years, adherents of the ‘PC gone mad’ doctrine have rebranded again. Borrowing a word coined by Black Americans referring to the lasting legacy of their previous second-class citizenship, this sort of stuff is now dismissively labelled as “woke”. Now it’s bandied around pejoratively to mean any kind of socially awareness, usually on the basis that it’s excessive or superfluous or trendy-but-stupid.

Some critics of the March referendums (for the record, they’re fully entitled to oppose them if that’s what they conscientiously believe) have already started lobbing this word around. Proposing to remove a Constitutional image of a woman having duties in the home is, you might be told, ‘woke’.

Maybe it is. Maybe it’s part of ‘the woke agenda’. Maybe the idea of a constitutional nod to non-marital relationships - whether it’s lone parents, or unmarried cohabitees, or some other domestic configuration - is all a woke brainfart by some ambitious politician or an underemployed civil servant.

But even if it is, what of it? What’s the problem with simply using language that is mindful of its audience? Maybe – and you’re entitled to disagree – a lack of foresight on language is the reason why a Constitution written in 1937 needs amending in 2024.

Whatever it is, we owe it to ourselves to debate the nature of the society we’d like to achieve, and to have reflected in our country’s founding document, without throwing around labels that declare the opinions of others as invalid.