Tears of Joy

Abortion Referendum in Ireland

Happy is an inadequate description.  Young women across Ireland led the fight to repeal the 8^th Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which outlaws abortion.  It was repealed by 66% of the voters, with only one county, heavily rural Donegal in the north, voting no.  Thousands of posters went up on lampposts all over Ireland saying “Yes” and “No,” while the two sides battled politely and not so politely on O’Connell Street, Dublin’s center.  The Catholic Church probably funded most of the no posters, and it looked like it mobilized the young girls in its confirmation classes to be the ‘female’ face of ‘no.’  The Archbishop of Ireland was ‘disappointed’ by the result – at least that is what he said from behind his ten-foot walled and wooded compound in Drumcondra.

"The Quiet Revolution" - May 27th Irish Sunday Mirror Front Page, with 6 more pages inside. 

This was also clearly a vote supported by the Irish working classes.  A young man working as a clerk in an insurance company in Dublin said he would vote yes.  He mentioned that he had asked his girlfriend how to vote.  A 40+ year-old house cleaner in Galway told us she would vote yes.  A 40+ farm wife in Kilarney said she would vote yes, but wasn’t going to tell her husband how she was going to vote.  An activist from Limerick noted that her ‘honk for yes’ sign brought out honks from male truck drivers, construction workers and postal carriers.  She knew then that men were behind repeal.  They were not unaware that unwanted children might bring years of child support or a sad marriage for themselves too, not just their girlfriends or wives, so forced baby-making was not in their interest either.  

Bars in Dublin had ‘yes’ tables and signs, while trade unions hung enormous ‘yes’ banners over their offices.   In the streets of Dublin it was clear nearly all young women in their 20s and 30s supported repeal.  The pictures of celebration in the square at Dublin Castle featured mostly young women. 

The main body of the conservative Fianna Fail party was against repeal, but Labour, Sinn Fein and a small wing of Fianna Fail supported it.  All the socialist organizations supported repeal.  Sinn Fein immediately announced the need for a similar referendum to be held in northern Ireland, still a British colony but with a 8^th Amendment similar to Ireland’s itself.  This referendum might also juggle northern Ireland's attachment to England, given the "UK's" Brexit vote which would detach northern Ireland from the EU.  In the past, Irish women would have had to travel to the U.K. to get an abortion.  This made it harder for working class women and girls, but that will no longer be true.

The Good Girls Finally Win One

Clearly this is a huge defeat for the reactionary positions of the Catholic Church, which opposes abortion, contraception, family planning advice, homosexuality, divorce and won’t allow women to become priests.  This archaic attitude towards sexuality, children and women is a world-wide problem for the Church.  This comes from its roots in a medieval economy and history.  Just as its occasional ‘anti-capitalism’ comes from its nostalgia for a non-commodity society based on serfdom.  It is as if it is still promoting children in the face of the Black Death.  Certainly it is promoting the child labor needed for a primitive rural peasant economy.

Scandals around clerical child abuse and the starvation of orphans had weakened the Irish Church already.  Especially noted was the forced death of Savita Hlappanavar, who was denied an abortion in Galway during a miscarriage and died of sepsis.  Just after the vote, another scandal erupted, as one headline screamed ‘Nuns Forge Birth Papers.’ A Catholic adoption society was caught by the government claiming that some foster parents were actually ‘birth parents.’  Adoption activists pointed out that if other Catholic adoption societies were looked at, the same would be found true.

One commentator noted that Ireland, which at one time was an ethnically homogeneous society, has now being impacted by the world-wide pattern of migration and travel.  As a result Irish people were being exposed to influences and people they had never had contact with before.  As any trip to Ireland will confirm, this is a society much like Italy – seemingly stuck in the past.  That is now changing.

The Poll

The detail lost in the whole fight is that this repeal only allows the law to be ‘redrawn’ - it mandates little else.  This allows the parliamentary right-wing to try to create an abortion law that is restrictive… similar to the efforts of anti-abortion politicians in the U.S. in various states.  “Democracy” as we know has a way of breaking down when it travels up the pipeline of capitalist 'representative' legislating, where a mountain can become a molehill.  So all is not won yet, even after this landslide for abortion rights.

At any rate, a great win for the people of Ireland. Tears were shed.

P.S. - Sinn Fein has proposed an immediate end to a clause in the Irish constitution (41.2) which reads: "The state shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

Red Frog

June 1, 2018