From sovereignty to social liberalism: Two new dimensions of constitutional identity in Ireland

Abstract

The question of constitutional identity in Ireland has long been muted in Ireland, largely because the Supreme Court affirmed a principle of unlimited constitutional amendability which precluded any immutable core of constitutional ‘identity’ being recognised. However, the concept has recently become more prominent in two, quite different senses. First, the Supreme Court has recently recognised constitutional identity as a limit on the Government’s capacity to ratify international treaties, thus developing a formal doctrine of constitutional identity for the first time. Secondly, in the period since the great recession, constitutional referendums have increasingly been used as a mechanism of identity-affirmation, crafting an organic constitutional identity that has, in practice, been linked with a new politics of social liberalism in Ireland. This article describes both the limits and specificities of the new formal doctrine developed by the Supreme Court, as well as the peculiar use of constitutional referendums as a symbolic and identity-affirming mechanism in recent Irish politics.

Keywords: sovereignty, Ireland, social liberalism, constitutional law, referendums