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Question from a Yankee. How is the Irish constitution interpreted? Is it taken literally as law, or is it more "suggestive?" Those clauses you quoted kind of confuse me. Taken literally, the old one seems to be saying that all mothers are entitled to state welfare that fully supports their life, which would be very generous and I'm guessing the country didn't really follow through on that. The new one... I don't even know how to parse that. It just seems like empty words that mean nothing. But I think the constitution in European countries tends to work differently than it does in the US, less absolute and more "here's a starting block to start writing laws off of."
We're sort of in between your own Constitution, and the 'unwritten constitution' of the UK. The Constitution is the basis for law, which is why there have to be referenda to change the wording, so unlike the American decision on abortion where emanations of penumbrae were taken to mean the Constitutional right to privacy included the right to an abortion, we had to delete the article in our own constitution which explicitly made abortion illegal before our government could pass laws permitting restricted abortion.
So the 1937 language was meant to be interpreted as 'the State has a responsibility to ensure women won't be forced out of the home to work' but how that was to be achieved was left to interpretation - did it mean making sure the male breadwinner had high wages? banning married women from being employed (the marriage bar)? Other things like social welfare payments? Just ignore it as aspirational language?
As to what you say about the new suggested language, yeah. It's just empty words that sound good and enable the government to go 'look how progressive we are'.
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It varies dramatically depending on the clause. In 2018 we had a constitutional referendum on whether to repeal the 8th amendment of the constitution, a passage which expressly forbids abortion. The amendment passed and abortion became legal essentially overnight. Likewise the gay marriage referendum in 2015, which passed.
Most people I've spoken to who abstained from voting on this year's referendum used essentially your reasoning to justify their decision to stay away from the polls: that the revised wording seemed entirely symbolic and ceremonial, rather than anything which might have any meaningful impact on public policy. I don't know if that's true (I think that these amendments would have significantly impacted legislation had they gone through) but it certainly seems to have been a factor in how people voted or chose not to vote.
Well, the government tried to have it both ways. They had Roderic O'Gorman going around saying passing the referenda would mean that the courts would make the government live up to the obligations, while the leaked advice of the Attorney-General said no; also that this would have nothing to do with immigration, while the leaked advice of the Attorney-General said it would, should cases come to court.
I tend to think the public view that this was fancy language which they'd weasel out of later on, by saying they were only committed to "strive" to do stuff rather than "have to do", was correct.
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From what my admittedly lacking research tells me is that there was an initial, 'strong' version of the constitution that did enshrine them as rights, but the finance department took one look at the figures for such a welfare program and said 'no way, we can't afford it.'
So they were degraded into nonbinding 'directive principles', so it has the weight and pomp of one's Amazon wish list. But still, it is a relic of the strong Catholicism that was once strong in Ireland, which the government is now desperately trying to remove.
that makes a lot of sense.
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