The Fairest Referendum Money Can Buy

Mercator.net ^ | 5/19/15 | Michael Cook

[marshmallow]

As Friday’s referendum on same-sex marriage in Ireland approaches, attention has turned to the funding behind the Yes campaign.

A petition has been launched which says that “this push for same-sex marriage in Ireland has not at all been a ‘home-grown’ phenomenon, but, rather, a carefully-orchestrated and massively well-funded assault on the natural family, coming from private American funding”.

In most countries funding local politics with overseas money would be as popular with voters as barbecuing puppydogs at a school fair. But not, apparently, in Ireland.

A charity founded by Irish-American businessman Chuck Feeney, Atlantic Philanthropies, cheerfully acknowledges that it has poured about US$28 million over the past 13 years into strategic LGBT campaigns in Ireland.

A columnist for the Irish Times, Breda O’Brien, was seething with rage this week at the thought of American dollars buying Irish votes:

“This is not Atlantic Philanthropies funding a hospital or school. This is foreign money being systematically invested to change public opinion, to deliver seamlessly a Yes in a referendum that has enormous consequences for family law for generations. All the while soothing us by spinning it as just ‘seventeen little words’. Can American money buy an Irish referendum? Let’s wait and see.”

What has Atlantic Philanthropies achieved? Quite a lot. Even Friday’s referendum, it turns out, has its fingerprints all over it.

[marshmallow]

Ireland has lost the faith. That's the real problem. Feeney is simply a vulture feeding on the corpse.