Ireland Votes to Retain Ban on Divorces : Wide Margin of Victory Confirms Loyalty to Catholicism

Irish voters have rejected a proposal to allow divorce in this 93% Catholic country by a wide margin in a nationwide referendum, election returns showed today.

The governing Fine Gael party conceded defeat today with party spokesman Peter White saying, “We expect a final outcome of 60-40 against the amendment.”

White said the voting on Thursday was about evenly divided in the greater Dublin area, “but it was against the amendment pretty much everywhere else.”

The ban on divorce has been the law of the land for 49 years.

Radio Telefis Eireann, the national network, projected a 3-2 overall vote against legalizing divorce. Anti-divorce campaigners claimed it would be closer to 2-1 against, and expressed satisfaction.

Predictable Reactions

“I am delighted and give thanks to God that the people have been delivered from the evil of a divorce culture,” said lawmaker Alice Glenn, who broke with her Fine Gael colleagues to fight the amendment.

Jean Tansey, a leader of the Divorce Action Campaign, which fought for a yes vote, called it “a disastrous result and a slap in the face to separated people” who cannot, under Irish law, get divorced.

The government was seeking to allow divorce for couples who could show a court that their marriage has been irretrievably broken down for at least five years.

Rejection of the referendum was a clear rebuff to Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald’s effort to liberalize Irish society and make the marriage law in Ireland more compatible with practice in the Protestant-majority British province of Northern Ireland.

Loyalty to the Church

The hard-fought referendum tested the loyalty of Irish Catholics to their church’s teachings.

Sen. Michael D. Higgins of the Labor Party said the result had serious implications for Irish hopes of persuading Northern Ireland to be unified with the Irish Republic.

“It shows that we cannot cater for a minority in our own republic,” he said.

The projected outcome meant that Ireland remains the only Western European country other than Malta that legally binds marriages for life.