Ireland to vote on removing ‘sexist’ references to women from constitution

DUBLIN: Ireland is poised to vote on Friday - International Women’s Day - to replace constitutional references on the importance of a woman’s “life within the home”, the latest attempt to update its socially conservative 1937 founding document.

While social change in the once deeply Catholic nation has spurred the removal of bans on abortion and same-sex marriage, the constitution contains a clause recognising “that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has pitched the vote, deliberately being held on International Women’s Day, as a chance to delete some “very old-fashioned, very sexist language about women.”

“A woman’s place is wherever she wants it to be and nothing less is acceptable in our constitution,” Orla O’Connor, director of Ireland’s National Women’s Council said while canvassing for a “yes” vote in central Dublin on Wednesday. A second clause due to be replaced says the state “shall endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”