DUBLIN

“REPLACING THE FAMILY with some woke crap like ‘durable relationships’ is an insult to all the people in this country who have taken the trouble to form a raise real families. This is a nation of families, of clans with names that go back to the beginning of time. Family means something here. It may still mean something here when it has long lost its value elsewhere. And don’t get me going on the carer malarkey. My only gripe with the Constitutional Article that give a special place to mothers, is that the Irish state never took it seriously. Ever. In its day, it was virtue signalling claptrap. It continued to be so. I’m happy for it to go but not be replaced by more virtue signalling claptrap. And if I see one more fucking British newspaper talk about attempts to modernize Ireland, I’ll join the fucking IRA. When those cunts get past the sixteenth century, and when a Catholic is permitted to be their head of state, then they can lecture us on modernity. Too many of our political class cringe before British notions of modernity, and that goes right to the top. That has to stop!”

The above are the words of Mary, commenting on the recent Irish constitutional referendums. She is a single mother from inner-city Dublin, both of whose children died from drug overdoses; whose husband killed himself after years on the dole back in the 1980s; whose street is littered with the homeless and destitute every night; whose spirit remains undaunted.