While the first civil partnership ceremonies in the UK, which took place today in Belfast of all places, are to be welcomed as a reasonably sane and compassionate acknowledgement of reality, it raises the question of what effect this legal innovation will have on the island of Ireland as a whole. According to Slugger O'Toole, "anything that even indirectly challenged the status of marriage would require a constitutional amendment." (If this is the case, I pray the Irish electorate has moved on from the mid-1990s, when the legalisation of divorce barely squeaked through on a margin of about a thousand votes in a referendum.)

However, given the fact that such partnerships are explicitly not marriages, I wonder whether it would be possible to introduce legislation without having to tweak the Constitution.

Moreover, it is arguable that--given the framework of the Belfast Agreement, which states that "measures brought forward [in the Republic] would ensure at least an equivalent level of protection of human rights as will pertain in Northern Ireland,"--a well-funded legal case might oblige the introduction of similar unions down South sooner rather than later.

Proper legal experts, feel free to weigh in.