Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

They do not want anything like family to cut across their idea of radical equality. They see men's and women's roles in society as indistinguishable, and to achieve that they will use the Trojan Horse of undefined "durable relationships" to now form the fundamental unit of society. Let us think about that. Any anarchic relationship, once it is durable, which does not mean duration, as we know, can form the unit group of society - a relationship in which no duties or responsibilities are spelled out but which is now to have any privilege to which a married couple might be entitled. Again I ask the question I asked yesterday. Where are the mainstream people in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in this? Are they blind? Is this why we had no pre-legislative scrutiny? If we do not ask, we will not be told, and that is a shameful dereliction.

My amendments seek to continue to anchor the family in marriage while extending the cover of family to non-marital, understood as similar to married, relationships. At a minimum, they will protect the binary adult relationship. The wording of my amendment is certainly a reasonable attempt to hit a middle ground here if what the Government says it values it actually does value. As I said, at a minimum, it will protect the binary adult relationship and it will avoid the setting up of new groupings based on durable relationships that will have no responsibilities to one another. Imagine that: relationships that have no responsibility to one another but that can be said on the basis of some vague definition of "durability", non-existent at the moment, to form the unit group of society.The wording proposed by the Government is a classic modern leftist tactic to enshrine in the Constitution something that is essentially meaningless - a durable relationship - so that later it can be invested with any meaning that advances the political progressive cause. In this case, families will mean what you want them to mean. As Humpty Dumpty told Alice - not our friend Senator Alice but a different Alice - "when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." The Minister might express a view that he does not have throuples, polygamy, strange sects or immigration challenges in mind but that is just his view. If his definition of family is inserted into the Constitution, we have no idea where it can lead. The Minister can reassure us all he wants that the Attorney General sees no issues here with regard to, for example, aspects of immigration and family reunification but we are all wise enough to know that Attorneys General do not possess tablets of stone or fortune-telling crystal balls any more than the rest of us do.