Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I come here today less than enthusiastic about this. I said to the Minister the last day we spoke about this that he has made it very difficult for parties and people like me and mine who really want to progress the equality agenda in this country and has made it even more difficult for the citizens' assembly, which did a lot of work on the question of equality and how it should apply to the Constitution. Amazing work was done by the Joint Committee on Gender Equality, much of which was based on constitutional legal arguments. Nevertheless, the work was very impressive. Regardless of what was recommended to the Government, it has been ignored and the Government has gone ahead and given us a very weak set of proposals for constitutional change.

This makes it difficult for people to be enthusiastic and to fight for it but it will provide an opportunity for some mischievous elements of our society, about which we spoke earlier in respect of questions of race. They will also use the question of gender to put their spoke in and try to influence and muddy the waters. How does the Government plan to campaign for a "Yes" vote on this? The Government is obviously going to promote a "Yes" vote because it has put forward these clauses it is asking us to deal with so if the Minister could outline how the Government's campaign for a "Yes" vote is going to proceed, it would be quite helpful.

We tabled two amendments that were ruled out of order. Again, I would like to ask the Minister questions about that because both the citizens' assembly and the Joint Committee on Gender Equality recommended non-discriminatory language for Article 40.1 but the Government chose to leave it out and keep the old-fashioned discriminatory-sounding language in the second clause, which states:

All citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law. This shall not be held to mean that the State shall not in its enactments have due regard to differences of capacity, physical or moral, and of social function.

We wanted to delete that, and I am speaking to it because it has been ruled out of order so we will get another chance, and replace it with the State shall in its enactments have due regard to the principles of equality and non-discrimination. Can the Minister explain why this has been ruled out of order and explain why that should not be included in the idea that we need to extend the definition of the "family", which we agree with? That is obvious. One cannot go against that. More than one in five relationships involves lone parents with children and marriage is basically almost like the last option. A councillor who was with me this morning at the press conference lived as a lone parent, then lived in a cohabiting couple and is now married. This explains the story of lots of people's lives, yet the Government is still continuing to give marriage a stronger status over the other states that people live in. Could the Minister explain that? I really regret that our amendments were ruled out of order and I would like him to explain why he made that decision.

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