Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I accept that and I will not linger on the point except to say that the principles of the McKenna judgment were clear - the Government may not spend public money promoting one side or the other of a referendum. It follows from that in spirit, if not in law, that those receiving public money should be very careful about getting involved in a referendum and must certainly be asked the question each time they show up as to whether their bias has an aspect of self-interest because the Government and many NGOs show little appreciation for the value of marriage.

Marriage is a social good. It has a causal impact on outcomes for adults and children with regard to completing college, earnings in life, social and emotional adjustment, employment prospects and future marriage and mental health prospects. As I said yesterday, the two-parent married home has no competition when it comes to delivering the goods for families. There is a mysterious dearth of studies in this country but the Americans are not slow in evaluating what is good. I make this point because a question has to be asked before we proceed further in this debate. Are we allowed to say what is objectively true and evidence-based or are we to be faulted for finding apparent distinctions in the evidence between what works better or what does not work as well simply because that does not endorse every single person's individual choice, which is always to be respected by me, the State, the courts and everyone else? Are we allowed to point to what the evidence shows? There has been no research on or promotion of marriage in this country. We wonder aloud why we have high crime in disadvantaged communities where there uncontrolled groups of young people controlling the streets in places, yet we do nothing to harness the value of marriage as a factor while supporting all sorts of other situations where people do great work in giving extra support to those who go it alone in parenting. Can we not look at what the evidence supports to see if there is an argument for honouring marriage? Why else would the Minister want to leave in the Constitution that the State guards the institution of marriage and will protect it from attack? There is an unwillingness to acknowledge what marriage does, there is lip service to continuing to respect it and there is a stripping away of any proposed theoretically and socially ideal link for marriage with the establishments of family in our society in general, with due regard and support for the widest range of situations.

A person in the least affluent social grouping in Ireland is only half as likely to be married as someone in the most affluent group and is three times more likely to have suffered a broken marriage. Does that mean that marriage is just some kind of bourgeois middle-class institution or is it something we should wonder about as to whether marriage has something to contribute to our society?