LAST UPDATE | 10 Mar
THE LEAKING OF the advice of the Attorney General to Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman regarding the referendums on family and care, a day before voters went to the polls, was “absolutely scandalous”, a Minister of State has said.
On Thursday, The Ditch published an article containing the leaked advice from Rossa Fanning on the proposed care amendment to O’Gorman.
The advice from Fanning to O’Gorman states that there is a “lack of guidance from the courts” on how the word ‘strive’ will be interpreted.
The Ditch also published an article in relation to the family referendum and the term “durable relationships” on Thursday evening.
Fanning said that in the absence of clear guidance within the constitutional text or by way of legislation, “it is difficult to predict with certainty how the Irish courts would interpret the concept of ‘other durable relationships”.
The Family amendment was rejected by 67.7% of voters, while the Care amendment was rejected by 73.9%.
Speaking to RTÉ Radio One’s This Week programme today, Minister of State Mary Butler said it is a “huge concern” that the advice was leaked on the same day a broadcast moratorium was in affect from midday.
She said it was “absolutely scandalous” that the documents were leaked.
She added: “There’s no moratorium across social media and that’s something that we’re certainly going to have to look at going forward.”
Professor of law at the University of Galway, Donnacha O Connell, told This Week that he completely disagreed with Butler’s comments that the moratorium should be extended to online media.
He instead argued that the moratorium should be scrapped.
Yesterday, O’Gorman said the leaking of the advice was “really frustrating”.
In a statement this evening, The Ditch said it will not apologise for “acting in the public interest.”
“If indeed The Ditch’s publication of the unpublished advice was ‘scandalous’, it was a scandal caused by the government’s refusal to publish the advice in the first place,” the statement read.
Reacting to the No/No outcome, Butler said that it is “obvious” the Government’s explanations of the proposed changes to the constitution “didn’t meet the threshold of certainty for many people”.
“The people spoke clearly, they’ve had their say, and they clearly and concisely did not agree with the changed wording we proposed,” she said.
“It wans’t explained clearly enough and we have to take ownership of that,” she added.
Butler rejected the suggestion that voters may have been confused about the referendums.
“We didn’t, obviously, explain it well enough and we didn’t alay people’s concerns,” the Minister of State said.
Butler said the No campaign “exploited things in relation to unintended consequences that might arise and that would have been dealt with in the courts”, adding that “social media played a huge part in this, as well”.
“I was tired of reading these posts about ‘this is going to have a huge impact on immigration’,” she said.
“At the same time, regardless of what was misinformation, what was on social media, we still have to take responsibility for this.”
While reflecting on yesterday’s result, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín, who had campaigned for a No/No vote in the referendums, said he would be in favour of updating the Constitution to recognise a father’s role in the home.
“The idea that the Constitution should recognise mothers and fathers’ roles within the home, I think is a good thing, and is a thing and shows gratitude for their efforts within the home,” he told This Week.
He added that Aontú would also have liked to see the language recognising family in the referendum updated to include those not based on marriage.
“The problem is that the Government put an amendment in front of the people that nobody could understand. The ministers couldn’t get their heads around it themselves,” he said.
With reporting by Jane Matthews
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