Last week the Irish people delivered a blow to the corrupt Irish government. They voted an overwhelming No to a referendum that would have redefined family and women. The proposed referenda altering the nation’s constitution enjoyed the support of Ireland’s elites, but the attempt to embed woke values in it has backfired. The Government asked voters to remove the word 'mother' from the Constitution and they answered with a resounding No. They also rejected by a huge margin the attempt to foist the extremely nebulous term "durable relationships" on the Constitution. The government worked in conjunction with every political party and legacy media outlet to tell and coerce the people into accepting these changes. The people refused. John Waters returns to Hearts of Oak to analyse why this referendum was proposed and what the rejection means, not only for the government but for the people of Ireland. John Waters is an Irish Thinker, Talker, and Writer. From the life of the spirit of society to the infinite reach of rock ‘n’ roll; from the puzzle of the human ‘I’ to the true nature of money; from the attempted murder of fatherhood to the slow death of the novel, he speaks and writes about the meaning of life in the modern world. He began part-time work as a journalist in 1981, with Hot Press, Ireland’s leading rock ‘n’ roll magazine and went full-time in 1984, when he moved from the Wild West to the capital, Dublin. As a journalist, magazine editor and columnist, he specialised from the start in raising unpopular issues of public importance, including the psychic cost of colonialism and the denial of rights to fathers under what is called family 'law'. He was a columnist with The Irish Times for 24 years when being Ireland's premier newspaper still meant something. He left in 2014 when this had come to mean diddly-squat, and drew the blinds fully on Irish journalism a year later. Since then, his articles have appeared in publications such as First Things, frontpagemag.com, The Spectator, and The Spectator USA. He has published ten books, the latest, Give Us Back the Bad Roads (2018), being a reflection on the cultural disintegration of Ireland since 1990, in the form of a letter to his late father. Connect with John... SUBSTACK johnwaters.substack.com/ WEBSITE: anti-corruptionireland.com/ Recorded 18.3.24 Connect with Hearts of Oak... WEBSITE heartsofoak.org/ PODCASTS heartsofoak.podbean.com/ SOCIAL MEDIA heartsofoak.org/connect/