Ireland votes in ‘women in the home’, ‘makeup of family’ referendums

Prime Minister Leo Varadkar says proposed constitutional amendments a chance to delete ‘very old-fashioned, very sexist language about women’.

Voters in Ireland are casting ballots in twin referendums on proposals to replace constitutional references to the definition of the family and women’s role in the home.

Prime Minister Leo Varadkar described Friday’s polls, which deliberately fall on International Women’s Day, as a chance to do away with “very old-fashioned, very sexist language about women”.

The two proposals, called the family amendment and the care amendment, would make changes to the text of Article 41 in the country’s socially conservative, 87-year-old founding document.

The first asks citizens to broaden the definition of family by removing a reference to marriage as the basis “on which the family is founded” and replace it with a clause that says families can be founded “on marriage or on other durable relationships”.

The second would remove a reference to women’s role in the home as a key support to the state. It would delete a statement that “mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home” and add a clause saying the state will strive to support “the provision of care by members of a family to one another”.