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.