Irish barrister Laoise de Brún joined Tucker Carlson to discuss attempts to change Ireland’s constitution in how women and family are described.
Irish voters will head to the polls on Friday, International Women’s Day, to vote on removing the words “woman” and “mother” from the Constitution.
de Brún, the founder of The Countess, formed to promote the rights and interests of women and children in Ireland, shared the hard-left’s attempted erasure of women and the devaluation of motherhood.
Tucker Carlson: It’s important to remember that what’s happening in America right now is not just happening in America. It is happening around the world or around a slice of the world, specifically in European countries and in countries in which the majority of the population has historically been of European descent. That’s where it’s happening. And those are the only places it’s happening. And it’s all the same. Now why? We’re not sure. Lots of guesses on that.
But what we can observe is very obvious in all of those countries. The population is being changed dramatically by immigration. All of the economies of those countries are moving from manufacturing or have moved to some sort of weird neoliberal finance economy, which is not a strong economy.And in every one of those countries, the history of the people who live there is being erased. And we say all those countries, we mean all of them. And that would include small but fairly influential Ireland, the island off Great Britain.
In Ireland, everything we just said has happened and now a new thing is happening. Forces of neoliberalism are trying to change the country’s constitution, a specific chunk of language. They want to change the way that women are described in the Constitution because they call the language misogynistic. So they’re going to liberate more women in Ireland, get ready for slavery, because that’s what that usually means. So we’re going to read the language that they want to replace right now.
We want to warn you this could shock you. Here’s what the Irish Constitution says as of right now, “The state recognizes that by her life within the home, the woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The state shall therefore endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged, by economic necessity, to engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home.”
Now, depending upon how you look at that, that is the most female-affirming possible language ever written. We recognize, in other words, that giving birth to life, continuing the species, and making sure that life grows into decent adulthood. In other words, being a mother is important. In fact, maybe the most important thing. That’s one way to look.
The other way to look at it is get back to your cube at Citibank. Freeze your eggs if you want kids. That’s the neoliberal view. And in that view, it is deeply offensive to acknowledge that women have an important role in society outside of, say, the HR department or in some sales job.
So on Friday, International Women’s Day, the people of Ireland are going to vote on this. The vote will ask them, should we get rid of these words describing motherhood as important? Well, Laoise de Brun is paying attention to this. She’s a lawyer, a barrister in Ireland, and she’s leading the fight against the effort to eliminate this language. Why is it important? She joins us now from Dublin to explain. Laoise de Brun, thank you so much for coming on. So this is not an argument that we would have in the United States because we don’t have any such language in our founding documents. So if you would, for a non-Irish audience, tell us why you think this matters and what’s at stake.
Laoise de Brún: Well, as you quite rightly said
Carlson: May I ask question, I mean, it’s a little more obvious what’s happening from the distance of thousands of miles from where I sit. I mean, here you have the banks promoting wage slavery for women and calling it liberation. If this were 100 years ago and the cotton mills were telling girls, you know, it’s way better to work in a cotton mill than it is to have your own family, people would say, that’s not progressive at all. The big monopolies are pushing girls to give up the hope of children so they can work at some crappy wage for some huge company. We would see that is predatory. How do people fall for it now? It’s the same dynamic.
de Brún: Yes. It’s funny. I mean, I think that, some of this is to do with a very reductive, interpretation of, Betty Friedman’s book The Feminine Mystique. I mean, she really launched the second wave of feminism. And in her later work, she did say that you know, women who stay at home should never be castigated. And nor should men. But I think what happened was it was it became this very reductive branch of feminism, which was all about getting out to work. Act like a man, behave like a man, pretend you don’t have periods, miscarriages. You don’t give birth. You don’t gestate, you don’t lactate. And that was equality. And I don’t think that has served women one bit. I think it’s been a lie.
When you look at the statistics in Ireland as well. I mean, there was a huge push, obviously, across the industrialized nations to push women into the workforce and that had to be dressed up as equality, as feminism. But the same push didn’t happen to, encourage men to take on 50% of the burden at home in terms of running of households. So what happens now when we look at the statistics in Ireland, you know, Irish women are typically working full time, but they’re coming home and doing 38 hours extra a week of unpaid labor. And that puts us at the bottom of the league in terms of European figures. For example, nowhere in Central Europe or Western Europe or Scandinavia, more along the same lines as Romania and Malta. And this must be quite embarrassing for our government because, as I said, they really want to promote us as a progressive country. But rather than try to help women, rather than do that, they will just remove this language and hey presto, the problem is solved.
But I see 41.2 as an ennobling recognition of the profoundly important work that women do. And after all, most women are mothers, and most women want to be mothers. And when they’re asked, they want to be at home with a small children. But the corollary is true. I think that most women would choose an intellectually stimulating or interesting job they could fit around their children once the children are in school. And going back to Betty Friedman’s book, her book was written around women in suburban America who they were probably quite bored and lonely, and their children were in school. So I think it depends on the age group of the children as well.
Carlson: Yeah. I mean, in point of fact, Betty Friedan, since she was giving advice to the world’s women, lived a miserable life and was a miserable person. Her life was a failure, of course. So that ought to tell you something. If the doctor takes the medicine and dies, maybe you don’t. You don’t take it. But I have to ask, like, who is who is pushing this? Is it the same people who are changing Ireland’s population with immigration, trying to convince the people who are born there not to have kids? Because this is obviously discouraging of family life? I mean, who’s for this? Who’s leading the charge?
But wait, wait, wait. Can I just interrupt you? So. So Ireland was never a colonial power. Actually, it was colonized. Of course. It’s got nothing to apologize for. It’s never done anything against anybody. So the idea that the Irish are racist, if they don’t want to be crowded out of their own country, like on what grounds? How are the Irish racist? And why should you put up with that?
I mean, all of this seems connected. I mean, just bottom line. If you’re trying to convince a population, or prevent a population from having children, from reproducing itself, maybe you don’t love the population. Maybe you hate the population. If you had a child instead of the child. Whatever you do, don’t have children. Don’t provide me grandchildren. That’d be a pretty clear sign you hated the child. So, I mean, do the people of Ireland see that their leaders clearly hate them? No matter what they say? Look at what they do. Ignore what they say. Watch what they do. It seems like an act of profound hostility to me.
Yes. I mean, this seems to be a growing disconnect between what the people on the ground want and what the, official Ireland, you know, the elites in power and the official media, tell them they should want, and I think we’re particularly vulnerable to outside influence because of the structure of our government. You know, we were very poor, after independence. And so the church stepped in and provided, you know, health care, education, schools, social care, because we couldn’t have built that structure ourselves. But we still haven’t. This is the problem. We sort of handled, a lot of that function to what I like to call the industrial, you know, the NGO industrial complex, 40,000 NGOs who are not regulated in a statutory sense, but who provide functions of state and really become proxy arms of the state. And but they are very vulnerable to, being sort of influenced by this hard left ideology. And I say hard left, you know, with care. I am a lifelong lefty myself. However, I feel like it’s a train that is, you know, trundling in high speed over the edge of the cliff. And I’ve gotten off that train because I don’t want to be part of anything that tells me, like our prison inspector did recently, that women who are pregnant, incarcerated women who are pregnant in prison in Ireland are less vulnerable than men who identify as women. I don’t want to be part of this. So with our organization, we are a grassroots trying to fight and campaign against the most egregious excesses of so much of this ideology, which, as you say, the people don’t even want. It’s just been forced onto them by the state.
Carlson: It’s just beyond. Laoise de Brun, thank you for explaining all of that to us and Godspeed. Clearly, you’re on the right side and I hope you can save your country. I really do. Thank you.
Watch:
How do you convince women to give up what they love most and submit to wage slavery at a bank? Simple: call it feminism. A report from Ireland. pic.twitter.com/H2JMHmYQib
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 6, 2024
You can watch the full interview, Uncensored: Taking Women Out of the Constitution, at TCN.