Irish Voters Overturn Ban on Divorce

Dramatically climaxing a taut national struggle between tradition and reform, the conservative voters of Roman Catholic Ireland decided to legalize divorce in the closest election of their nation’s history, results released Saturday showed.

Although victory in Friday’s landmark referendum was narrow, the result marked a major shift in Irish public opinion. Analysts said acceptance of divorce would move Ireland closer to its European partners and diminish the authority of the Catholic Church, so long the nation’s moral arbiter.

“We’re bringing Ireland into the 20th Century at the dawn of the 21st,” exulted Mags O’Brien as she watched decisive urban “yes” votes being counted at an exhibition hall here Saturday.

O’Brien, head of a nationwide pro-divorce campaign, is one of 80,000 Irish citizens who are legally separated but have been constitutionally forbidden to end spent marriages with divorce.

“This is a defining moment in the separation of church and state,” said Frances Fitzgerald, arts minister and a pro-divorce activist.

But Rory O’Hanlan, a judge who headed anti-divorce forces, said the results showed that “across Europe, people seem to be drifting away from their religious beliefs toward consumerist, selfish, modernist philosophies.”

Anticipating challenges from disappointed anti-divorce supporters, election officials ordered a complete national recount late Saturday. That tally showed that, with more than 1.6 million votes cast, the result was decided by 9,118 ballots; that is, 50.3% were in favor and 49.7% were opposed. Turnout was put at 61%.

“It may be a narrow margin, but it is a clear verdict. I am very relieved. It has been a very worrying day for those of us who campaigned for a ‘yes’ vote,” Prime Minister John Bruton said Saturday night.

The amendment is to take effect immediately, but there will be no quick fixes. Rather, couples will have to demonstrate that they have lived apart four of the past five years and that their marriage is irreparable before they may divorce, according to Law Reform Minister Mervyn Taylor.

The election returns signaled a big change in Ireland’s view of itself and its social priorities.

In 1986, a call to delete the anti-divorce article from the republic’s 1937 constitution was defeated by a 2-1 margin. This time, anti-divorce support dropped across the country.

In the end, though, it was liberal Irish cities, particularly in Dublin where a third of the voters live, that offset rural opposition to change.

A 64.9% “yes” vote in the Dublin Northeast electoral district clinched the decision.

Bruton’s coalition government and all six political parties represented in Parliament supported the constitutional change.

Campaigning against divorce was a conservative alliance supported by the Catholic Church.

Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II gave their backing to Ireland’s bishops, who denounced the initiative as “false kindness, misguided compassion and bad law.”

Recent sexual scandals involving priests appear to have undercut both the church’s prestige and its electoral message. So too does urban life erode moral values, O’Hanlan complained.

“People go from being lazy about religion to indifferent to openly hostile, particularly in urban areas,” he told reporters at Dublin’s vote-counting center.

“Hello divorce . . . Goodby Daddy,” shouted anti-divorce placards from Dublin lampposts, reinforcing a message that divorce would lead to the dissolution of families.

“Give someone you know a second chance,” read the pro-divorce posters, arguing that failed marriage, however sad, is a fact of life that needs to be addressed legally.

Since the defeated divorce initiative in 1986, the Irish Parliament has adopted 18 pieces of legislation spelling out the rights and obligations of separated spouses. Issues of property rights, child custody, counseling, succession rights and pension entitlements all flesh out a 1989 separation law.

The supporting legislation may have encouraged one voter in six to switch from anti to pro in nine years, but there were other factors, said Finance Minister Rory Quinn as he watched the tense vote count.

“Urbanization, the rise in living standards, the information revolution and the growth of the problem itself all contributed,” Quinn said.

Before the 1986 vote, separated people tended not to speak out publicly. In 1986, there were about 37,000 of them. Today, lobbying loudly for change, there are more than twice that number, including the leader of the largest party in Parliament.

“This was not a liberal lurch but an expression of concern with family breakdown,” Quinn said.

At the same time, he added, the divorce victory completes a liberal agenda of change.

In recent years, family planning has become respectable, homosexuality has been decriminalized, and abortion information has become legally available.

Speaking with reporters on behalf of elated pro-divorce forces, Arts Minister Fitzgerald attributed the victory to “the changing role of women and the fact that people are less overwhelmed by religion and more willing to take individual decisions.”

“There is a greater distinction between church and state. We are moving from a traditional society to a more open, urban society: Everybody knows somebody who’s separated,” she said.

With 92% of Ireland’s 3.5 million people baptized Catholics, it was Catholics themselves who bucked church teachings to approve the divorce amendment, as had been done before in such Catholic bastions as Italy and Spain.

The real issue, said conservative politician, separated Irishman and pro-divorce supporter Bertie Ahern, was that “Irish people are prepared to take seriously the rights of minorities in this country.”

In Europe now, only Malta forbids divorce.

Gerald Casey, a university philosophy professor who was vice chairman of the anti-divorce campaign, said Saturday that the result had less to do with changing public opinion than manipulating it.

“This is a victory for the political and media establishments. It was David and Goliath. Pro-divorce forces had the government, the political parties, the newspapers and state-funded radio and TV. We were all amateurs,” Casey said in an interview Saturday.

In urging the reform, Bruton, a devout Catholic, reminded protesting bishops that “separation of church and state in Ireland has often existed more in theory than practice.”

As prime minister, he said, it is his job to address social problems like the tens of thousands who are separated and thus in legal limbo.

The bishops, he said, should “devote their energies to persuading individuals to follow their teaching of their own free will.”

The divorce prohibition was written into the 1937 constitution, Irish historians say, as a means of assuring Vatican support for the young Irish republic. The constitution also acknowledges the church “as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.”

Analyst Justine McCarthy said the referendum marked a defining instant in Irish national life: the first time that the Establishment abandoned what she called “holy Ireland.”

“To Ireland-modernists, the arrival of divorce seemed a foregone conclusion. For the holy-Irelanders, it represented one last chance to salvage the Irish-and-Catholic culture which had been slipping from their grasp,” she said.