Somewhat against my expectations the abortion referendum in Ireland was a landslide win for repeal. Every constituency except Donegal voted yes by huge margins, and in the latter exception it was a very marginal no vote. Dublin constituencies were 75-80% yes, and mostly on high turnouts. This is a crushing defeat for the No side, and actually made me wonder how out-of-date Ireland’s reputation as a conservative catholic country actually is.
From the start I did not rate the Repeal campaign, and apart from some Student Union posters felt that they were shying away from some of the realities of abortion, at times seemingly trying to promote individual politicians rather than the repeal cause. It was only very late in the campaign I realised how extensive the Repeal grass-roots campaign was, and I am pretty certain they had some major bankrolling.
As for the No/Save/Keep campaign, my initial feeling was that they were well prepared, most notably for their use of statistics such as the one in five abortion rate in the UK which as far as I could tell was actually true. However significant parts of the campaign were nasty from the start, following the abortion is murder script from the US. The No campaign also engaged in rampant astroturfing, with Facebook flooded with adverts for supposedly “neutral” sites such as Undecided8th.org which actually had pro-life agendas.
The no campaign clearly depended much more on online advertising than the yes campaign, and although I suspect the latter committed much the same sins on a smaller scale, there was certainly rampant pro-life astroturfing — the sheer number of Facebook pages for regions nowhere near where I live sorta gave it away, so it is pretty clear quite a packet was spent on the sponsorship. I am hardly surprised that Google simply banned all advertising outright, no doubt in part concluding that Facebook’s preferred policy of only allowing Irish-based organisations to advertise was easily by-passed.
Ethically there is much in the pro-life view that every foetus should have the chance of a full life, and when one of my friends was himself mulling the ethics of abortion, I do wonder whether what I said at the time inadvertently nudged him towards pro-life. However this is all well and good as he was someone for whom support & means were a non-issue, and this bring on the Achilles’ heel for the no campaign: Irish history. A history of not caring about either mother or baby after birth. Abortion does not seem an ethical issue when living conditions in the likes of the Tuam home were so bad that a lot died within six months.