Ireland votes to abolish blasphemy law by a nice margin - exit poll - Polidicks

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/abolition-of-blasphemy-offence-favoured-by-69-of-voters-poll-1.3677347 Please holding referendums Ireland! You're becoming too powerful!!

worth noting that turnout this referendum/election is predicted to be well below 50%

doesn't seem like something to be too excited about, Idk why the legislature couldn't handle this or were they just too scared of any backlash.

It's not really a big ticket issue that will excite many voters, I'd think, especially younger ones. I'm honestly surprised it was repealed with that kind of turnout because you'd expect that to be older voters with strong opinions about blasphemy laws, but I guess Ireland just has a more sensible population than over here.

The blasphemy law hasn't been enforced in decades and none of the presidential candidates were appealing to anyone. All the major parties decided to support our last president, Michael Higgins, who ran as an independent. Basically the law change means little and the president was practically decided already.

It was in the constitution, which requires a referendum to change

Ireland is proof that referendums can work

Good for Ireland!

I was going to ask how the fuck did Ireland have a blasphemy law on the books when even the goddamn US, with all it's fundies, still had full freedom of speech - but the I remembered abortion was also illegal in Ireland until this year. Wow, seems like you all have some real hangups. Good thing you're tearing them down piece by piece.

Compared to the US where at least one state has a ballot initiative this year whether to amend the state constitution to make abortion 100% illegal after Roe is overturned.

I mean, fundies have been wanting to oveturn Roe for ages. It's just that the only way they even had a shot was decades of Republican voter suppression leading to their current slim majority and Supreme Court picks they've made recently. It's still a long shot though - and the key thing is they've been a factual minority in the country for ages. All I was saying is that, considering how overwhelming the votes for legalizing abortion were in Ireland, I'm shocked it took so long.

I believe until relatively recently Ireland was pretty poor, agrarian, and very religious, but the EU helped them a lot.

31% of people in a first world country want to curb free speech in preference to their personal religion. Excellent. It's probably only worse in America, too.

we were the backwater of europe until things started to improve in the 90s. a lot of the religious restrictions enshrined in the constitution can be attributed to the patronage of eamon de valera, who was taoiseach during the 20s and 30s. he had this image of ireland as a prosperous, agrarian state based on gaelic and catholic values. unfortunately for him, sean lemass became taoiseach for a while in the 50s and realised that this idealism was fucking stupid and attempted to industrialize and modernize the irish economy, but he was voted out before his reforms could properly take place. and them eamon dominated irish politics until finally dying and then we had a string of corrupt taoiseachs until the celtic tiger, when our taoiseachs became even more corrupt. after the recession and the recent upswing things have only now really started to look up for ireland

I would say it could depend on the population/culture

'Can' isn't always.

ah makes sense

They're already planning another referendum next year to remove a clause which refers to a woman's "place in the home" Referendum on place of women in the home deferred

Nice

Abolition of blasphemy offence favoured by 69% of voters nice

nice

I didn't vote because I have fuck all knowledge of what it even means.

I'm sorry but in this day and age when it's so easy to look things up on the internet this excuse seems really weak and makes it look like you were just lazy.