Ireland back at it with the referendums, votes to liberalise divorce law - Polidicks

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48410903 TLDR divorce was only legalised in 1995 when they voted by 50.3% for a constitutional amendment allowing divorce after 4 years of separation. This time they voted by 80.3% to take the 4-year rule out of the constitution and allow parliament to set a new separation period, which will prob be 2 years Another step in Ireland stripping out the crazy old conservative bullshit from their constitution. There is still at least one more constitutional referendum that will probably be held at some point, to remove a reference to a woman's "place in the home"

The fact you need a separation period at all is retarded.

while I applaud referendums, these are issues a legislature should be dealing with but are too cowardly to touch.

Ireland’s constitution is very... broad. It encompasses more than just the framework of the government, eg this matter regarding divorces. And it can only be amended by referenda. Hence why they had a referendum on this issue. I don’t believe that constitutions ought to have broad scopes, but it’s not unique to Ireland. Eg America’s bill of rights takes things too far as well.

Every time Irish referendums are brought up someone completely ignorant of our country feels the need to chime in and say they shouldn't be used as we use them. There is a process in Ireland to holding a referendum, information is given to everyone in factual, objective pamphlets which explain how the law currently is and what the change in the law would mean, political parties are allowed to campaign for their preferred choice but they are not allowed to use outright lies. The vast majority of Irish referendums have gone swimmingly, to compare our process to Brexit is just insulting.

A lot of the odd things in the constitution are to do with the Catholic church having a huge say in writing the constitution in the 30s. Do note as well the Irish constitution's Irish version takes legal precedence over the English version, which may lead to odd translations due to the Irish language being notoriously difficult to translate. This recent string of referendums has served to rectify the backwards Catholic stuff in the constitution because of recent scandals that have rocked the faith of quite a lot of people.

So you're saying that everyone will be perfectly educated and politicians running the campaigns can't lie. I'd like to move to that reality because at the end of the day, politicians can lie in their campaigns regardless of later punishments and the public will never always be perfectly informed, regardless of what you hand them. You can't brush off the misinformation and shit throwing that's taken over every other democracy.

In Ireland politicians are held to a very high degree of accountability. Although I dislike my country for other reasons, to say that Ireland's democracy has fallen prey to misinformation and shit throwing is ignoring the fact that Ireland's democratic tradition is so robust because of objective, fact based organisations like the Referendum Committee that are completely apolitical. He's not saying that everyone is perfectly educated, what he's saying is that people in Ireland are GIVEN objective facts from a non- partisan source and they are educated on the functioning of the government. Read our constitution and electoral laws first before you spout bullshit about our country's electoral policy.

Ireland is one of the few Western countries that's completely dodged the alt-right populism wave, they must be doing something right

the difference is, when we vote for a protest party we vote for the greens and not nazis

I really dont understand why this is. There are plenty of people here who would be all aboard with that shit but for some reason they have no cause to be. My guess is that we havent experienced much in the way of the radical left (their main presence here has been on the issues of abortion and gay marriage, which are things most of the population can get behind) and so have no reason to swing to the right.

My theory is that the people of Ireland know what a divided polarized country looks like, for instance Northern Ireland and do our best to avoid it. Organised Militant action is seen as terrorism in Ireland.

Can we have weed legalisation referendum next