I Will be Voting Yes to Repeal. You Should, Too.

I’ve been reluctant to write anything about the upcoming referendum on the Eighth Amendment, mainly because I don’t think I have anything original to say about it. I also didn’t particularly want to waste a lot of time explaining why I’m entitled to an opinion on this subject (we live in a liberal democracy. Everyone is entitled to an opinion on matters affecting the common weal). I also didn’t want to add another polemic to the endless vitriolic culture-war bullshit that now defines so much of our public discourse – No campaigners are liars! Yes campaigners are smug liberals! – et cetera.

But this is important. So here are my two cents.

Because of the nature of our constitution and the nature of our history, almost every referendum we hold in Ireland is a referendum on what kind of country we want to live in. In 2015 we said, very clearly, that we wanted a country that was pluralistic and tolerant: we extended the right to marry to everyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Like many people, I found this an extraordinarily moving moment. I found it so for complex reasons.

On the day of the marriage referendum, I found myself thinking about a story my mother once told me. My mother grew up in Inchicore, near the Goldenbridge orphanage – an industrial school run by the Sisters of Mercy. (You can read about the appalling history of Goldenbridge here and here.) Walking past the gates of the orphanage – this was in the mid-1960s – my mother would sometimes find handwritten notes tucked into cracks in the stone – notes from the children who lived there. “We are hungry,” these notes said. “We are beaten. We are frightened. Please help us.”

Thinking about this on the day of the marriage referendum, I wept. Because it seemed to me that the Yes result had demonstrated that Ireland was no longer the kind of country in which such things could happen.

The picture, above, shows the gates of the now-defunct Goldenbridge industrial school.

The Catholic Church campaigned for a No vote in the marriage referendum. As it has campaigned against all forms of liberalism and enlightenment for the last half-century of Irish history. As it has campaigned to preserve its putrid reputation in the wake of the Ryan and Murphy Reports, the discovery of the Tuam babies, the revelation of abuses at the Magdalene laundries and at industrial schools.

The referendum on the Eighth Amendment offers us another chance to say that the Catholic Church, long a malign parasite on the Irish body politic, has no place here any more.

It isn’t the only reason to vote Yes. It isn’t even the best reason to vote Yes. (The best reason to vote Yes is to say, powerfully and unignorably: We are a country that will never punish anyone, ever, for an accidental or unwanted pregnancy; we are a country that will never, ever let a woman die rather than abort an unviable foetus.) But it’s one of my reasons.

I’ve heard it said that some Irish men feel they have no right to vote in this referendum, or that they have no right to an opinion. (A popular argument goes: Only women should be allowed to vote, since this issue only affects them!) This is absurd, and misunderstands the nature of a liberal democracy. Ireland is ours – it is everyone’s. We all live here. What kind of country do we want it to be?