Gavan Reilly: These were two of the most hated referendums ever...The Government must own it

Well, they can’t say they didn’t see it coming. If they read the Meath Chronicle on December 12th - and you can’t tell me that Leo Varadkar doesn’t sit down to peruse these pages every week… - they’ll have seen it spelled out. “Standalone referendum, symbolism without little perceived practical impact, and an annoyed electorate. Sound familiar?” I wrote on these pages then, omitting only to point out the possible downsides from the woolly recognition of ‘durable relationships’.

Some of the anger should have been seen coming. From being in various WhatsApp groups with other parents of children with disabilities, I knew there was palpable anger at the Care Referendum and the way it purported to offer support for carers, while making no direct commitments to those receiving the care themselves. What’s more, I was seeing the same anger being mirrored by those who did not have direct skin in the game, but who were furious at the State’s pathetic offering for the disabled, and who planned to vote No in solidarity at the tokenism of the amendment. For the first time in my life, I staked money on the outcome of a political race: on Thursday morning I put a bet, at even money, on the Care Referendum to fail. Nice one, Paddy Power.

That said, nobody could have anticipated the scale of the defeat - nor that the Family referendum would be beaten out the door with the vigour that it was.

Simon Coveney made an interesting comment on Sunday afternoon in Clonmel – the only place in which a Cabinet-level minister was showing their face on the day after their shellacking. He certainly made it worth my two-hour drive down for a 15-minute press call, opining that in the final few days of the campaign, a certain anger had become apparent, especially when it came to the Care ballot.

Why, I then interjected, couldn’t you respond to that and step up your messaging? Well, his answer came: it’s not like we didn’t try. Leo Varadkar had been out; Micheál Martin had been out; Norma Foley had done a TV debate; Roderic O’Gorman took up every invite he received; Heather Humphreys, Fine Gael’s director of elections, had been on every local radio station in the country (though not, apparently, on the Michael Reade Show on LMFM). It was not that people didn’t hear the message, Coveney concluded: they heard it, and simply rejected it. The Government would have to accept it.

That’s one thing the Government will have to do. Another is to explain – in ways they didn’t beforehand – why they chose to go their own route, when a plan had been charted for them already. A Citizens’ Assembly had already recommended removing the wording about women’s duties in the home and inserting wording about ‘reasonable measures’ to provide for care. An all-party Oireachtas Committee agreed. Why, then, take the unilateral measure of falling short on that? Opposition parties may have been nearly united in a Yes vote, but it was the Government itself which was given a popular plan and chose not to use it. The Government has to own that decision too.

There are other things on which the Government has to reflect now. One is on its patchy record on referendums. Leo Varadkar told us – five or six times – that the people had rejected Government amendments to the Constitution 13 times, and it didn’t always translate into a party political verdict.

That’s true: referendums are largely single-issue campaigns and don’t always reflect the election to come. 62per cent of voters backed marriage equality in 2015; the government that oversaw and implemented it, lost half its seats nine months later.

There’s a separate observation to be made there: since coming to power, Fine Gael’s referendum victories have come on cutting judges’ pay, the EU Fiscal Compact, marriage, abortion, blasphemy and divorce. None of those campaigns required government parties to take the lead knocking on doors – the ones that needed campaigning for, were ones that non-partisan campaigners led. Political parties, on their own, are out of practice knocking on doors and trying to change minds on single issues. That’s now been shown up.

Another point is how establishment media (including my own outlet) allowed debate on the amendments to go under the radar and generally unrecognised on air until the final week or two. This is partly because there was such an imbalance in the prospective Yes and No participants, and partly because we thought the public were generally apathetic to the discussion. Whether true or not, the lack of mainstream debate didn’t mean there was no debate at all: it was merely happening in the ether of cyberspace, an area with both a tendency for cynicism and a complete lack of genuine everyday government interaction. The debate might well have been lost before the debates, on air, even began.

And while there might be multiple reasons why either ballot was lost - went too far, not going far enough; tinkering with the family, or tinkering with the family’s property - there is a common thread to these two referendums: they were run by this government. They are single issue campaigns but both were run by this administration, which chose the date and campaigned without urgency. Together, they were two of the three most unpopular referendums in Irish history. Whether they like it or not, that must say something about the people bringing the proposals.

It’s plenty of food for thought on those long-haul flights around the world this week.