Fianna Fáil TD Mary O’Rourke, who chaired the Oireachtas committee which produced the proposed wording for the children’s referendum, has slammed possible opponents of the wording as “the forces of old”.

It isn’t the first time she has attempted to get her smears in first. Actually, her latest remarks represent a slight dialling down of her rhetoric.

Last September, she said she expected that a children’s rights referendum would “involve horrific fury throughout the land”, adding that this fury would come from ““those who believe they should have total control in the family”.

I suppose we can take such utterances as a tacit admission by Deputy O’Rourke that the referendum will be “divisive”, an epithet usually solely reserved for referenda proposed by the pro-life movement.

Deputy O’Rourke’s remarks are a none-too-subtle attempt to brand those with questions about her Committee’s proposed amendment as extremists, and as potentially dangerous people.

This is not the approach of someone interested in a full discussion of the complex issues involved. They are words designed to shut down debate.

Legal academics such as Dr Oran Doyle of Trinity College and renowned senior counsel and constitutional expert Gerard Hogan, who are both liberals and therefore presumably would not be considered part of the ‘forces of old’, have expressed concerns about the proposed wording.

Dr Doyle, in a speech delivered in Bratislava, said that the proposed referendum would require the Courts to apply a series of principles which were inconsistent. Specifically, he said that the wording posed the question as to who would decide what the best interests of the child were. He went to suggest that Article 42.2.3 of the wording gave a de facto answer to this question, an answer which said might entail “greatly expanded state power and greatly reduced parental autonomy”.

However, he went on to acknowledge that Article 42.3 of the proposed wording would temper this somewhat.

He added that, given recent reports about the manifold failures of the HSE to look after children in its care, “it might be better to focus, for now, on the practicalities of how we manage the interventions that we do make before deciding if we need to make them more often”.

Gerard Hogan has similar concerns to those of Dr Doyle. He told RTE in February: “We’re all in favour of the best interests of the child, and there is something of a mother and apple pie dimension to this. But in practical terms you have to ask yourself, when you’re talking about the best interests of the child, who is going to decide what is in the best of the child, and how is this going to be done? And if you’re talking about the State vindicating the rights of the child, you have to remember that this is likely to be officialdom, or some judge making this decision.”

Rather than attempting to demonise potential opponents far in advance of a referendum, Deputy O’Rourke ought to be attempting to address the sorts of concerns raised by Gerard Hogan and Oran Doyle.