Tánaiste Joan Burton’s been telling a story recently. She recounted it at the end of her speech at the Labour Party Conference, and told the Irish language online magazine Tuairisc.ie too.

Speaking in support of a Yes vote in the marriage referendum, Burton says that she was struck by one woman she met in Moneygall, Co Offaly, who said she wanted her son, who is gay, to “settle down”.

“This was an Irish mammy thing,” she said. “She wanted to see all of her children settle down, whether they were gay or straight,” she said.

As she put it in the conference speech:

“She wanted what every Irish mammy wants for their child.”

What’s wrong with this picture? Hint: it’s not Irish mammies. Far from it.

Burton’s comments remind me of a piece Jim Glennon wrote for the Indpendent a couple of years ago, which gobsmacked me at the time and frankly still does. Glennon linked the attempt to legislate for same-sex marriage to Patrick Pearse’s struggle to achieve a truly equal Ireland. In the course of it, he made an interesting comparison.

“Pearse’s chosen mode of communication, verbally from the steps of the GPO, was of its time, however dramatic its context. In recent days, a relatively mundane tweet, a chosen mode of communication for our current time, caught the eye.

“Its author Ann Marie Part describes herself as “a suburban Irish mammy” and “health professional” and will, almost certainly, never achieve Pearse’s historical relevance. Her content, of 140 characters or less as required by Twitter, will never be quoted as often as the 1916 Proclamation but, magnificent in its simplicity, is worthy of quotation in full:

“I have twin teen sons. 1 gay 1 straight. I love and respect them equally & expect soc(iety) and the State to do so too.”

“Ironically, a mother’s love was something of which Pearse himself wrote poetically:

‘Lord, thou art hard on mothers:

We suffer in their coming and their going

And tho’ I grudge them not, I weary, weary

Of the long sorrow – and yet I have my joy:

My sons were faithful, and they fought.’

Despite the remove of a full century, it’s not difficult to envisage an empathy between the Pearse and Part brothers, and between their respective mothers too – equality and an appreciation of the unique maternal influence are shared fundamentals.” (My emphasis).

Again, I ask – what’s wrong with this picture?

What’s wrong is that in this campaign it’s the Yes side who are arguing, emphatically and repeatedly, that children do not benefit especially from a mother’s love: any sufficiently loving adult can be swapped in and nothing lost.

What’s wrong is that Joan Burton’s government has just passed a piece of legislation, the Children and Family Relationships Act, that eliminates and connection between the apparantly archaic concepts of “motherhood” and “fatherhood” and legal parenthood. A child can now have two legal mothers and no legal father, and when Leo Varadkar’s surrogacy legislation comes in they’ll be able to have two legal fathers and no legal mother.

And this same government is trying to pass an amendment, (with the enthusiastic support of Jim Glennon) that would establish as the “natural and fundamental unit of society” families with no mothers.

It’s a pretty common assertion to hear from the Yes side that marriage, and thus the marriage referendum, has nothing to do with children. But if that’s the case, why, then, does Amnesty International have the following sentence in its press release announcing its campaign for a Yes vote?

“Everyone has a right to be free from discrimination in the enjoyment of their human rights – including the right tomarry and found a family.” (My emphasis)

This is exactly correct. But who can pretend the family has nothing to do with children? Marriage in the Irish constitution and international law is absolutely connected to children. But once you can get Yes campaigners to admit this, they will then tell you that they don’t see any particular benefit to children being raised by a mother and father as opposed to any two adults (or one adult).

To no-one’s surprise, I disagree with that profoundly – but it’s not my objection here. I actually just want to speak up for consistency.

Simply put, I think it’s really, really wrong to argue for a Yes vote in a referendum on the basis that Irish mammies love their children, when your whole vision of the family will ensure that many future children will be deliberately raised without a mammy, and your referendum is predicated on the idea that this will be no great loss.

Either you believe in a ‘unique maternal influence’ and want to use public policy to try to ensure that as many children as possible experience it – or you don’t. I’d love if Joan Burton, Jim Glennon and the Yes side would make up their minds.