Ireland

• ‘People have power, even if they don’t usually feel like they do’

  Ahead of the publication of the 2018 State of Civil Society Report on the theme of ‘Reimagining Democracy’, we are interviewing civil society activists and leaders about their work to promote democratic practices and principles, the challenges they encounter and the victories they score in doing so. CIVICUS speaks to Linda Kavanagh, spokesperson of the Abortion Rights Campaign, in the aftermath of the historic vote that repealed the eighth amendment of Ireland’s Constitution. Passed in 1983, this constitutional amendment recognised equal rights to life to an ‘unborn’ and a pregnant woman, banning abortion under any circumstances.

  See also our interview with Ivana Bacik, Irish Senator and campaigner for abortion rights.

  1. The vote in favour of repealing the eighth amendment of the Irish Constitution exceeded 66 per cent. Did you see it coming?

  We had lots of surprises – we certainly never saw 66 per cent coming. We thought it would be hard win, slightly over 50, 55 per cent at the most. We also thought that the people who were not really engaged would just stay home and not make what they surely considered a tough choice. But with close to 70 per cent, turnout was the third highest ever for a referendum.

  Just so it is clear, it wasn’t our choice to go to a referendum, and I would never recommend it if it can be avoided. It is really tough, and while we won, it was a hard win, as people had to expose themselves and their stories. It was also expensive. But it was the only way to do this, as the amendment was in the Constitution.

  2. What was the state of public opinion when the process started?

  It is not easy to put a date to the beginning of the process. For my organisation, the Abortion Rights Campaign, it began in 2012. We started work in reaction to two major incidents around abortion rights that took place in Ireland in 2012. In the summer of that year, Youth Defence, a very militant anti-choice organisation, put up billboards all around Dublin, saying that abortion hurt women, stigmatising women who had had abortions, and saying lots of things that weren’t true. The protests that took place in reaction to this campaign were the biggest pro-choice demonstrations in a long time. This time, we were also organising online, on Facebook and Twitter, and this made it easier to get information out, so the protests were quite large. The first March for Choice, held in September 2012, gathered a couple of thousand people, which was no small feat at the time. It was the biggest in about a decade.

  A month later, Savita Halappanavar died. Savita was pregnant and died because she was refused an abortion. She had been told she was going to have a miscarriage and there was a risk of infection but, according to the law, doctors were not allowed to intervene until her life was at imminent risk. This was a real wake-up call and put us under the global spotlight. Soon afterwards, in January 2013, the Abortion Rights Campaign began its work.

  But none of this happened out of the blue; it was the result of decades of activism. And of course, the Abortion Rights Campaign was just one among many groups rallying for repeal. But Savita’s death was a turning point: many young people started their journey when it happened. From then on, the Marches for Choice got bigger and bigger every year and at some point, we figured out that we had to call a referendum to repeal the eighth amendment and push for political change. We had been agitating for a while, marching in the streets and getting bigger and stronger, and in the meantime, other terrible things that happened strengthened the view that change was necessary, including a horrific court case involving a young brain-dead woman kept on life support against her family’s wishes because she was 16 weeks pregnant.

  3. How did you manage to shift public opinion towards repeal?

  In early 2016 Amnesty International commissioned a poll that showed overwhelming support for change, with a breakdown of where people stood regarding different causes for legal abortion, including incest, rape, risk to the woman’s health and foetal abnormality. A little under 40 per cent were in favour of allowing women to access abortion as they choose, while about 40 per cent were in favour of allowing it only under very restrictive circumstances. Going in, we estimated we were looking at a maximum of 45 per cent of support.

  So we started with a strong, solid base of 40-plus per cent, and we knew the other side had a solid 10 to 20 per cent. There were lots of people, another 40 per cent, who were in doubt, unsure of where they stood. These were the people who could tip the scale, so we had to go talk to them. The common thinking is that people who are unsure will stick to the status quo because that’s what they know. But we knew that when people get the facts, when they get to listen to the evidence, they tend to come to a more pro-choice position. We knew this because that is exactly what happened to each of us, personally: we heard about the issue, thought about it, said ‘well, actually that’s really unfair, let’s work on it’. That’s also what we saw happen at the Citizen’s Assembly and again at the Joint Parliamentary Committee. We saw this time and again and knew it was just a matter of letting people have these conversations. We knew there was a big swathe of people that needed to be persuaded one way or the other, so this was a big part of our strategy: to encourage conversation and bring the tools so they could take place.

  As activism grew and marches got bigger, we figured out a couple of things. One was that there was an increasing sentiment for change: no matter how you felt about abortion, there was a growing sense that the status quo was not helping women. Our abortion policies had drawn criticism from international human rights bodies. This just couldn’t go on – so at some point we needed to start talking to politicians to make sure they understood that they couldn’t brush the issue under the carpet anymore.

  So we decided to make abortion a red-line issue in the 2016 general elections – that is, a key issue that politicians would be asked about daily as they knocked on our doors to ask for our votes. And we gave people the language to talk to their politicians about the issue. We knew that if they encountered the issue once and again when they were canvassing, they would pay attention. We did this in a number of ways: we had civic engagement training sessions where we would give people information about how referendums work, how the law works, what it says about the issue, what we can do and what our position regarding free, safe and legal abortion is. And it worked! We succeeded in forcing the issue into the agenda.

  The other thing we realised is that, if and when this came to a referendum, it couldn’t just be a Dublin-based campaign – we had to go national. So we worked very hard to set up regional groups in every county around Ireland. By the time the referendum came, there was a pro-choice group in every county. And those groups went on to form canvassing groups that would hold their own events and talk to their politicians.

  4. What role did the media play in the process? How did you work with both traditional and social media?

  From my perspective, a key takeaway from the process is that it is vital to use social media to create a space so people can have a nuanced discussion about these issues.

  With traditional media, our hands were tied, because when it comes to controversial issues, they are required to provide ‘balanced coverage’. According to a 1995 Supreme Court ruling, it is unconstitutional for the government to spend taxpayers’ money to provide arguments for only one side in a referendum. As a result, any broadcaster that receives state funding must allocate equal airtime to both sides. So, if you talk on TV about how you had an abortion, or you say you are pro-choice, the opposite view has to be given space as well. Even if someone was telling their actual story of needing an abortion and having to travel to the UK, saying exactly what had happened to them, rather than preaching about right or wrong, there would be someone who would be called in to ‘balance’ that. And the rule was interpreted very broadly, so it applied not just during the referendum campaign but also for years before that. It was very stifling.

  In other words, traditional media were a massive block to people’s education. You normally look to the media to educate yourself on an issue, but it is not educational to constantly pitch ideas against each other, especially on an issue as complex and nuanced as abortion can be. So we had to bypass the mainstream media to get to the people. Fortunately, we exist in the time of social media, and we put a lot of effort into it and gave people the language and the nuance to talk about these things. We were used to hearing discussions about the morality of abortion where it was either right or wrong: there was no middle ground for people who were not that comfortable with it but thought the status quo was bad, and there was no room to talk about it.

  We advocate for free, safe and legal abortion for anyone who wants or needs one, no questions asked, because we know it’s the gold standard and believe that women having choice and control over their own lives is a good thing. But we didn’t want to impose this on people. Rather we wanted to give people the language to talk about it, allowing them to ask more questions, to find out what they were ready to accept and how far they were ready to go. This really worked. There has been so much discussion about the dark web, bots, trolls and possible interference with the campaign – but there were hundreds of pro-choice Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles set by hundreds of pro-choice individuals, and we had tools to protect the space we had created where these discussions were taking place. For instance, a group of volunteers created Repeal Shield, which was basically a public list of bots and troll accounts. When a user flagged an account by messaging @repeal_shield, a volunteer would investigate, and if the account met the criteria of being a bot or troll, it would be added to the list. As a result, people could keep having a conversation without interference.

  One big takeaway from this is that people have power. They usually don’t feel like they do, but what they do matters. Someone clicking ‘like’ on your page because they really like it means so much more than paid advertising. People don’t realise that, but when it comes to something that needs to be shared by many people or otherwise won’t be visible at all, this gives everyone a bit of power. Of course, there’s a lot more to activism than clicking ‘like’ on a Facebook post, but every little thing adds up.

  We are always told that there we are an echo chamber, that we only talk with people who already think alike, but it turned out that we weren’t doing this at all. We got 66 per cent of the vote. That was not an echo chamber. That was reality.

  Traditional media and politicians were slower to catch up to this, so we carved our own way. I am not saying this is the way to go for every activist group around the world. For one, Ireland has very good internet coverage, most people have access to it, and we have high user rates of Twitter and Instagram. This is not the case everywhere. But we used the tools we had, and it worked for us.

  5. What other tactics did you use?

  We gave people the language and an understanding of the political process, and that didn’t happen on social media; it happened on the ground. We would talk to people and they would bring the issue to their doorsteps. The Abortion Rights Campaign is a grassroots organisation, and what we did best was give people those tools so that they could then use them themselves. For years we had stalls every second week so people would come, have a chat, get information, take a leaflet. We had monthly meetings so people would learn about the organisation and how they could join, and sometimes we had somebody bring in a different perspective, such as a migrant or somebody from Direct Provision, a terrible institution for asylum seekers. We also developed training activities for marginalised groups about abortion in a wider reproductive context.

  Other groups would lobby politicians. We are now probably going to do so, but at the time the grassroots campaign was our main concern. We also did advocacy at both the national and international levels, including submissions to various United Nations bodies. And we maintained links with Irish groups in other countries, because the Irish diaspora is very focused on this issue. We also had connections with other organisations that didn’t have a direct pro-choice mandate but might support a repeal stance, such as migrants’ rights groups, disability groups and others.

  Beyond women’s rights organisations, we got the support of international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, which meant a lot because everyone knows who they are, as well as some migrants’ rights organisations. An awful lot of the charity organisations in Ireland would have a nun or a priest on their board, so they would not take a stand on this issue. But a lot did, and we got a lot of support. More than a hundred organisations eventually signed up.

  And of course, we sold t-shirts, repeal jumpers, so we gave people visibility. People became visibly pro-choice. You knew somebody was on your side when you saw them. You felt supported on a decision that maybe once you took and never told anybody about. Now you knew there was a visible crowd of people who supported you.

  6. What was the tone of the debate?

  A lot of it was about the moralities of abortion. Many people would say ‘I believe that life begins at conception; I believe you are taking a human life’ – and that’s okay, it’s people’s beliefs. But there were also lots of arguments that were brought in that were disprovable, greatly exaggerated, or not responding to the reality of what people were going through. Abortion is a contentious issue and there are indeed conversations to be had around disabilities and the like. But people were saying things like: ‘99 per cent of the people who get a diagnosis of Down’s Syndrome will abort’. And may be true in certain contexts, but not necessarily here. And in any case, that says more about our attitudes towards people with disabilities than it does about abortion.

  While some of it was about people’s deeply held beliefs, there were also lies, exaggerations and a deliberate misuse of stats. Some really nasty stuff happened: a huge amount of graphic images were used and are still out there. I absolutely do not think that every ‘no’ voter is a terrible person - people have their beliefs and their struggles - but I do think the anti-choice campaign made it quite nasty. It never got as bad as we had expected, but it was still hard.

  7. For things to happen, changing the Constitution seems to be just a first - big - step. What work remains to be done, and what will be the role of the Abortion Rights Campaign?

  When the eighth amendment was repealed, legislation about abortion had already been put on the table. It wasn’t fully spelled out, but it provided broad strokes of legislation coming from the recommendations of the Citizens’ Assembly and the Joint Parliamentary Committee. As a result, people knew going in what they were voting for: 12-week access with no restrictions as to reason, and longer if a woman’s life or health is in danger or in case of severe foetal abnormalities. There are discussions about mandatory wait periods and this kind of thing, and we are not that happy about those, but part of our work is to have discussions about that.

  The legislation will be debated in the autumn and we expect it to be brought forward at the beginning of 2019. In the meantime, our job is to keep the pressure on to make sure that the legislation includes the right language and that people who continue to travel or take pills are taken care of. The Abortion Rights Campaign has a broader mandate. We have a mandate to seek the establishment of free, safe and legal abortion, but we also have a longer-term mandate aimed at de-stigmatising abortion. We’ve taken huge steps towards that because we’ve had this national conversation and it’s not possible to avoid the issue any more, but we still have a long way to go.

  It’s been more than a month since the referendum, and we are already strategising about what we want and how we see our role moving forward, in forcing legislation through and making sure people don’t fall through the cracks. Are people still having to travel to the UK? What improvements can be made? We need to make sure our legislation is good enough, that it allows people to get access. All along, part of the ban on abortion was also a ban on information about abortion, and most of all about how to get one. You were basically left to your own devices to go sort yourself out in the UK, and there were rogue pregnancy agencies giving terrible advice and purposefully delaying women seeking abortions. So a big part of what will come in the future will be making sure that doctors can actually take care of their patients. We take it that conscientious objection is going to come into play and need to make sure that it does not undo any of the good that we have achieved.

  Civic space in Ireland is rated as ‘open’ by theCIVICUS Monitor.

  Get in touch with the Abortion Rights Campaign through itswebsite orFacebook page, or follow@freesafelegal on Twitter.

• Do referendums improve democracy?

  By Inés M. Pousadela is a Senior Research Specialist at CIVICUS

  In Ireland, 2019 gets going on the heels of a busy, bumper year when some watershed changes were delivered via referendums. And by the looks of it, there’s more on the way.

  In October 2018, almost two thirds of Irish voters chose to remove a constitutional ban on blasphemy. But even this crucial advance in the freedom of expression was dwarfed by the unprecedented outcome of a referendum held five months earlier, which led to the legalisation of abortion in this staunchly Catholic nation.

  Read on: Open Democracy 

• IRELAND: ‘The referendums failed because the government overlooked the need to engage affected communities’

  CIVICUS speaks with Sinéad Murray, Communications, Membership and Information Officer at Treoir, about Ireland’s recent unsuccessful Family and Care Referendums.

  Set up in 1976, Treoir, is a federation of Irish civil society organisations (CSOs) that promote the rights and best interests of unmarried parents and their children in order to achieve legal and societal equality.

  What were the recent referendums held in Ireland about, and why were they important?

  The two referendums held on 8 March were aimed at changing the constitution, which was drafted in 1937 and heavily influenced by traditional social values regarding women, religion and family. Several referendums were held in the past few years to remove outdated concepts and replace them with more inclusive ones that reflect the modernisation of our society, and these two referendums were part of this trend.

  Although 40 per cent of families in Ireland are not based on marriage, article 41 of the Constitution of Ireland defines family on the basis of marriage. It only offers full protections to families based on traditional Catholic values, leaving out other family types, including single-parent or lone-parent families, cohabiting couples with or without children and kinship care families, in which the extended family steps in to take care of a child when a parent isn’t available.

  The Family Amendment sought to rectify this by providing greater constitutional protections and societal recognition to diverse family types and promoting gender equality in caregiving roles. The Care Amendment aimed to address the sexist language in a clause of article 41 that is colloquially known as the ‘women’s place in the home’ clause. It implies that women who work outside the home are neglecting their domestic duties.

  Although over time progress has been made in removing legislative discrimination against non-marital families, discrimination and inequality persist. For instance, lone-parent families face higher rates of poverty and housing insecurity. Further, since the 1930s, the government has regularly cited the constitutional definition of family to justify its discriminatory policies against non-marital families.

  Feminists have long campaigned against these constitutional clauses because they have contributed to a considerable amount of legislation that prevented women’s equality. To add insult to injury, article 41 doesn’t even recognise rights or provide protection for women who stay in the home, including married women, lone mothers, stay-at-home mothers and female family carers.

  Instead of simply deleting the article, the proposed amendment aimed to establish a positive, rights-based, gender-neutral, modern obligation of the state to protect caregiving, which is still overwhelmingly done by women.

  Unfortunately, neither amendment was passed. Sixty-seven per cent of voters rejected the Family Amendment and 74 per cent voted against the Care Amendment.

  What can the results be attributed to?

  Opinion polls indicated that around 20 per cent of voters would reject the amendments regardless of how they were worded or what arguments they heard in the campaign. I would argue this corresponds roughly to the conservative and far-right electorate. Although conservative and traditional voters likely contributed to the referendums’ outcome, they were far from its primary drivers.

  The numbers clearly indicate that many people who voted no in these two referendums had voted yes in the successful referendums on same-sex marriage in 2015 and on abortion in 2018. We need to understand why. Exit polls revealed the main reasons behind the two no votes in the 2024 referendums: a lack of clarity or information, a rushed process, lack of public consultation, a change perceived as insufficient and a general distrust in the current government.

  It was the government’s misunderstanding of past referendum successes that led to the lack of clarity and structure in this process. They took the progressive vote for granted and underestimated the importance of the actual wording and public engagement.

  The government published the wording for both referendums in December 2023, leaving a remarkably short window for campaign activities. It gave itself only six weeks to educate the public about the referendum process, communicate what was being voted on and try to persuade people to approve the changes. This limited timeframe posed logistical and political challenges.

  Surprisingly, the chosen wording deviated from the terms proposed by the Citizen’s Assembly – a body made up of randomly selected citizens tasked with deliberating on key political issues – and the Joint Oireachtas (Ireland’s two houses in parliament) Committee on Gender Equality. The Care Referendum, for instance, focused solely on protecting family care instead of encompassing care provided in the broader community. The government’s commitment to ‘strive’ to support care rather than being mandated to do so also raised concerns. The formulation for the Family referendum included terms such as ‘durable relationships’ that were undefined and caused further confusion.

  The rather abstract language used in both referendums also failed to afford enforceable new rights to the people concerned. If passed, the amendments wouldn’t have led to immediate, practical improvements in the lives of family carers or non-marital families – they would only have given them the right to challenge government decisions in court, which is a costly, intimidating and lengthy process. If the abortion referendum had only given women the right to go to court to demand an abortion, it likely wouldn’t have passed either.

  This lack of tangible benefits left many uncertain whether to vote in favour, strengthening the campaign against and allowing for misinformation to proliferate, driven particularly by far-right groups.

  Lack of trust in the current government exacerbated uncertainty. Public perceptions of the government’s failure to address pressing issues such as the housing and cost of living crises contributed to scepticism about the proposed changes.

  In essence, results were driven by a combination of factors and underscored the importance of clear communication, grassroots engagement and addressing public concerns in referendum campaigns.

  What should the government have learned from the successful referendums on abortion and same-sex marriage?

  The most serious mistake was to think that because they were on the same line of progressive, inclusive and rights-expanding change, the new referendums would produce the same result as the referendums on abortion and same-sex marriage. The government shouldn’t have taken a yes vote for granted.

  The government clearly misread the situation following the legalisation of same-sex marriage and abortion. In fact, the outcomes on abortion and same-sex marriage were far from preordained: they were the result of extensive, years-long grassroots mobilisation. Thousands of people advocated and protested for same-sex marriage and abortion for many years. Campaigns centred in the personal experiences of women and LGBTQI+ people affected by Ireland’s restrictive laws. Thousands of LGBTQI+ people spoke up about the stigma and discrimination they and their loved ones continued to face even after the passage of the 2011 civil partnership law. High profile cases such as that of Savita Halappanavar, who died after being refused an abortion, galvanised tens of thousands of women to speak out. The purpose was clear and the benefits of the referendums were obvious.

  The promise of tangible rights also motivated supporters. They knew that even if removing the constitutional ban on abortion would not result in abortions becoming legal overnight, the government had published a clear legislative plan for if the referendum passed. During the referendum campaign, it also said it would push for the legalisation of abortion up to 12 weeks into pregnancy. This gave people certainty about what they were voting for. Similarly, it was clear that same-sex couples after the referendum campaign would have the same rights and responsibilities associated with marriage as opposite-sex couples.

  The government didn’t see this, and so it overlooked the need to engage affected communities. Mobilising these groups is the most important asset in a referendum campaign and this was lost in the Family and Care referendums by the wording. The government also failed to clearly articulate the benefits of a yes vote. Unlike previous campaigns, the Family and Care referendums lacked a compelling narrative to rally public support. Legal or statistical arguments don’t persuade voters – personal stories do. But without the affected communities on board, those personal stories were hard to share. When those stories were shared, it was hard to definitely show how the referendum would adequately address the discrimination people faced. Lacking strong grassroots support, the Family and Care referendums faced great challenges in mobilising public opinion.

  Who campaigned for, and who campaigned against the proposed changes?

  Despite these shortcomings, most political parties supported a yes vote for both amendments, a common stance in Irish referendums. Although at Treoir we believed the government’s wording fell short, we still advocated for the change as we believed it was a step towards greater equality. Along with the National Women’s Council, One Family and Family Carers Ireland we led a campaign formed by 20 CSOs pushing for two yes votes.

  Only two political parties – both of which hold a small number of seats in the Dáil, the lower house of parliament – opposed the changes: Aontú and Independent Ireland. Their campaign focused on the confusing wording chosen by the government, and used the regular slogan of campaigners against change in referendums – ‘Don't know? Vote no!’. For them, the referendum was a cover to push for increased immigration or the legalisation of polygamy in Ireland. They also argued that the ‘women’s place in the home’ clause was a positive element of the constitution and removing terms like ‘mother’ and ‘women’ was part of an agenda to eradicate the concept of biological women. This stance was also supported by the Catholic Bishops Conference and the Iona Institute, a Catholic pressure group.

  Additionally, a third campaign emerged in support of a mixed vote, with the Free Legal Advice Centre among its supporters. They viewed the Family Amendment as an improvement but expressed reservations about the Care Amendment, arguing it would not provide any new rights and would perpetuate harmful stereotypes about women and people with disabilities. Equality Not Care, a group formed during the campaign, advocated for a no vote on the Care Amendment due to the impacts on people with disabilities, who would be considered as ‘subjects’ of care rather than independent rights-holders.

  What’s next in the struggle for gender rights in Ireland?

  The referendum campaign highlighted many of the issues that need to be urgently addressed, including the disproportionate number of lone-parent families, with 80 per cent of those headed by women facing poverty and housing insecurity. There’s also a need for a public childcare system, which would be essential for gender equality and hugely beneficial for lone parent families, along with real support for all types of carers, support for independent living for people with disabilities and family justice reform.

  Following this defeat, another referendum on these articles is highly unlikely any time soon. However, changing the constitution wasn’t civil society’s primary focus to begin with. Moving forward, we should concentrate our efforts in pushing for legislative measures rather than constitutional amendments.

  ---

  Civic space in Ireland is rated ‘open’ by theCIVICUS Monitor.

  Get in touch with Treoir through itswebsite orFacebook andInstagram pages, follow@treoir on Twitter, and contact Sinéad throughLinkedIn.

• Ireland: the A, B, C and X of civil society activism

  Open submission by Avila Kilmurray

• New Paper: Regulating Political Activity of Civil Society -- A look at 4 EU countries

  A comparative analysis of regulation of civil society organisations’ ‘political activity’ and international funding in Ireland, Netherlands, Germany and Finland. Written by CIVICUS, Irish Council for Civil Liberties, with support from The Community Foundation for Ireland

  This paper provides a comparative assessment of how the “political activities” of civil society organisations are regulated in Ireland and three other European Union member states. This paper focuses particularly on organisations, such as human rights organisations, which carry out public advocacy activities and rely on international sources for a substantial portion of their funding.

  All four countries are rated as “open” by the CIVICUS Monitor, a global platform which tracks respect for civic space in 196 countries. These four  european countries are also well known for their strong promotion of civil society, human rights and democratic freedoms through their foreign policy and international development cooperation on programmes. 

  Following a brief outline of key international and regional norms, the paper outlines relevant aspects of domestic regulatory systems in Netherlands, Germany and Finland. A final section sets out what Ireland could learn from these examples, with a view to reforming its laws and policies governing “political activities” and foreign funding of civil society organisations.

  Download Paper

• The Irish referendum, an exercise in deliberative democracy

  Ahead of the publication of the 2018 State of Civil Society Report on the theme of ‘Reimagining Democracy’, we are interviewing civil society activists, leaders and others about their work to promote democratic practices and principles, the challenges they encounter and the victories they score in doing so. CIVICUS speaks to Ivana Bacik, an Irish Labour Party Senator and campaigner for abortion rights, in the aftermath of the historic May 2018 vote that repealed the eighth amendment of the Irish Constitution. Passed in 1983, this constitutional amendment had recognised equal rights to life to an ‘unborn’ and a pregnant woman, banning abortion under any circumstances.

  1. Were you surprised by the scale of the vote in favour of repealing the eighth amendment? What do you think the result says about changing attitudes and opinions in Ireland?

  The scale of the vote in favour of repeal reflected what we were hearing on the doors during our months of canvassing before the referendum. The growing public awareness of the immense harm and hardship caused by the eighth amendment became increasingly apparent to me over the campaign. That awareness explains the immensely significant referendum vote in support of reform on 25 May. It shows that as a society we recognise the need for our democratically elected legislators to introduce an appropriate legal framework for the regulation of lawful termination of pregnancy.

  Over the years, public opinion had shifted towards supporting repeal of the constitutional ban and for legal abortion to take place in Ireland. This change was also influenced by a number of international law cases in which the Irish state was found to have breached women’s human rights by forcing them to carry pregnancies to term even in cases where they knew their babies would not be born alive.

  Following the public disclosure of the death in a Galway Hospital of Savita Halappanavar in late 2012, the contentious Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill of 2013 finally legislated for the X Case, allowing for terminations in limited circumstances where a woman's life was at risk. The positive experience of the marriage equality referendum in 2015 showed that Irish people were capable of great compassion and showed how successful a civil society campaign for social change can be. Then, in April 2017, the Citizens' Assembly voted 64 per cent to recommend that the termination of pregnancy without restriction should be lawful. In late 2017, the Joint Oireachtas (the Irish Legislature) Committee on the Eighth Amendment found cross-political support for holding a referendum and legislating for terminations at up to 12 weeks. The mandate for change arising from these public and parliamentary processes showed a huge willingness to accept the reality of abortion in a modern Ireland.

  Like so many Yes campaigners, I was overjoyed when I saw the Irish Times and RTÉ exit polls on the night of the vote. I was pleasantly surprised by the consistency of the Yes vote across Ireland. Commentators were quick to characterise the Yes vote as being young and urban, but the outcome showed that in fact, men and women, both urban and rural and of all age groups except from over 65s, voted for repeal. This resounding endorsement across all demographics gives great reassurance that the Irish people are ready for change. The Behaviour & Attitudes exit poll, commissioned by RTÉ, which surveyed 3,779 voters, found that the overriding influencing factor for voters was a woman's right to choose, at 62 per cent – 57 per cent for men and 66 per cent for women. This says a huge amount about the respect for women's health in Irish society. The same poll found that 24 per cent of those who voted Yes had changed their mind over the last five years, which would reflect the national experience of change during recent years.

  2. Can you tell us more about the Citizens’ Assembly process by which the repeal proposal came about, and the strengths, weaknesses and lessons of the process?

  The Citizens' Assembly is a body comprising a Chairperson and 99 citizens, randomly selected to be broadly representative of the Irish electorate, established to consider some of the most important issues facing Ireland’s future. The Assembly deliberates on the topics outlined in the resolution approving its establishment, and any other matters that may be referred to it. Their conclusions on each topic form the basis of individual reports and recommendations that are submitted to the Houses of the Oireachtas for further debate by our elected representatives.

  Since October 2016, the Assembly has met on a regular basis under the chairmanship of the Honourable Mary Laffoy. The Assembly is an exercise in deliberative democracy, as was the Constitutional Convention, held in 2013, which among other topics voted overwhelmingly in favour of same-sex marriage. The Assembly applies six key principles to its work: openness, fairness, equality of the voice, efficiency, respect and collegiality. The process has two main strengths: first, the random selection of participants, which ensures that they are representative of Irish society; and second, the use of expert witnesses, including from the legal and medical profession, which ensures that participants deliberate on the evidence before them. The process has shown how much citizens engage with the facts and are willing to learn. With a topic as sensitive as abortion, the public benefitted hugely, not just from the Citizens' Assembly, but from the subsequent process of deliberation at the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment.

  3. More broadly, what do you think are the opportunities and risks involved in direct approaches to democracy, given recent referendum results in other contexts? How can these risks be avoided?

  The eighth amendment was introduced in 1983 by way of a referendum, due to effective pressure from so-called ‘pro-life’ campaigners. Therefore, the only way to remove the amendment from the Constitution was by way of another referendum. The successful campaign this year shows how important it is to have a considered campaign which really engages with citizens. Due to the importance of the Constitution, and the sovereignty of the people, Ireland has a long record of holding referendums and this has contributed to widespread public engagement and interest with the topics under debate. While the Brexit referendum in the UK in 2016 could make countries wary of holding referendums, the experience in Ireland shows how important it is to have an open and transparent process leading to such a vote, which gives voters the chance to engage fully with the implications of the vote. Perhaps if a similar deliberative democracy process had been undertaken in the UK, the result of the Brexit vote would have been different.

  4. What were the key tactics employed by the Yes campaign, and what do you think was most responsible for its success?

  The main message of the Yes side was that sometimes a private matter needs public support, and this really resonated with voters. A number of brave individuals and couples told their own stories of having to travel for terminations and this struck a chord as well. From the very start, the Yes campaign ensured to engage with undecided voters, those who were unsure of how to vote but recognised that some change was needed. For many years, opinion polls had indicated very high support for a right to abortion in limited circumstances, such as in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities, rape and incest, or a risk to the health of the woman. The message to these voters was that no change whatsoever was possible without repeal of the eighth amendment. The focus of the Yes campaign was very clear: that Irish women are having abortions in their thousands each year, either travelling to the UK for terminations, or taking unregulated abortion pills here in Ireland. A vote to repeal allows us to address this reality and treat women compassionately with the care they need at a time of crisis. The campaign also engaged with male voters successfully. Turnout was particularly high: 64.13 per cent. Among voters aged 18 to 24 years, the Yes vote was overwhelming, at 87.6 per cent, an indication of how successfully the Yes side engaged with young voters through social media platforms. Another key tactic of the Yes side was having many well-respected doctors, and particularly obstetricians, as spokespeople for the campaign. 

  5. What needs to happen next to advance women’s rights in Ireland, and what role should Irish civil society play in this?

  The next thing that needs to happen is to ensure that the proposed legislation to provide for the termination of pregnancy is enacted by the end of the year, and that free contraception is introduced with it. Aside from the area of reproductive rights, the next step in reforming our Constitution will be to amend Article 41.2, which places women in the home, so that instead we respect the role of carers, male or female. At the present time, older women are suffering a loss in their pensions due to lost earnings imposed on them by the marriage bar on employment, which only ended in 1973. Separately, many older vulnerable women who were incarcerated in Magdalene Laundries up until the early 1990s are only now receiving redress and justice; it is important that this group of women gain the respect they deserve. There are plenty of other reforms needed regarding migrant and traveller women, who suffer a double discrimination. The gender pay gap is another area that is currently being addressed, after I introduced a Private Members Bill to bring in mandatory reporting of the pay gap in companies. The National Women's Council, which played a pivotal role in the Together for Yes campaign, has a key role to play in advancing these reforms too.

  Civic space in Ireland is rated as ‘open’ by theCIVICUS Monitor.

  Get in touch with Senator Ivana Bacik through herwebsite orFacebook page, or follow@ivanabacik on Twitter