Referendum Guides
Two short guides to next week's referenda to change the Constitution have been published by the Constitutional Studies Group at UCD. The guides are designed to provide voters with information about the background to, and the arguments for and against the proposed amendments to the Constitution.
What are these guides for? How were they prepared?
These guides to the upcoming referenda have been prepared by the Constitutional Studies Group, which is based at the School of Law in UCD. The Group is composed of academics with expertise in the field of constitutional law.
The aim in publishing the guides was to provide a summary of the legal arguments for and against the proposed amendments to the Constitution.
The guides were prepared on the basis of input from different members of the Group and are intended to provide neutral, independent and unbiased information to voters about the proposed changes to the Constitution.
The guides are confined to arguments or counter-arguments based on constitutional law. This means that the guides do not include arguments that might be made on the basis of political ideology or theory only.
The Group has aimed to include those arguments that are legally plausible.
That does not mean that all of the arguments are – from a legal point of view – equally strong. “Legally plausible” is a relatively easy test to satisfy. It simply excludes arguments that seem wrong or unstateable.
Lawyers and academics may disagree about the strength of different legal arguments. However, in an effort to maintain the neutrality of these guides, they deliberately do not contain commentary on the strength of the different arguments. It is for the voters to decide as to which arguments they find most persuasive.
The Group’s external advisory board had no input into the formation of the guides and it should not in any way be taken to reflect their views, either individually or as a whole.
