As women’s rights campaigners celebrated a historic victory in a referendum to relax Ireland’s strict abortion law, a packed-out side room at Dublin’s Intercontinental Hotel on Saturday night was filled with chants of “Ailbhe, Ailbhe, Ailbhe."
In the room was Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and health minister Simon Harris, alongside two of the co-chairs of Together for Yes – Ireland’s official abortion-rights campaign – Orla O’Connor and Grainne Griffin. They raised a glass to everyone who had played a role in turning the tide for women’s rights in Ireland.
But all the chants were for Ailbhe Smyth, Together for Yes's third co-chair, who's been fighting for women’s rights since the 1970s.
In Dublin on Sunday morning, Smyth still seemed to be walking on air. “The result was phenomenal, yesterday was extraordinary,” she told BuzzFeed News.
“You know when you hurt yourself you have a kind of anaesthetic that comes down on top of you and prevents you from feeling pain for the first half an hour or so? I think I sort of had that,” she said.
Since 1983 Smyth has fought against the Eighth Amendment. And in 2018, she finally helped to repeal it.
Alongside a prolific academic career, which included being head of women’s studies at University College Dublin from 1990-2006, Smyth has campaigned in each of the six referendums Ireland has held on abortion, including votes in 1992 on whether women should legally be able to obtain information on abortion and travel out of Ireland for abortion, and in 1983, when the landmark Eight Amendment was added to the constitution giving equal rights to the life of the unborn as to the mother, effectively prohibiting abortion.
Five years ago she formed the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, as a final push to get a public vote on abortion law, and when the referendum was finally called earlier this year, the organisation merged with hundreds of other abortion-rights groups around Ireland to become Together for Yes.
“If my superpower was being able to experience someone else's life, tomorrow I'd be @ailbhes,” Panti Bliss, the Irish drag queen and LGBT activist who was instrumental in securing 2015’s win for marriage equality in Ireland, tweeted as exit polls on Friday night revealed a victory for repeal looked set to be in the bag.
“After so many years fighting for women, thru victories, setbacks, and defeats, and then pull this off,” Bliss continued. “Tomorrow is going to be an AMAZING day to be Ailbhe Smith [sic]. And she deserves it.”
Ahead of the referendum, nobody we met on either side of the debate seemed to believe they would win by more than a tight margin, Smyth included. But the campaign to liberalise Ireland’s abortion law won by a landslide, with 66.4% of the Yes vote. Support for repeal spread across the country too with the Yes vote surpassing 60% in 30 of Ireland’s 40 constituencies. Only Donegal, in the northwest of the country voted No, by just a 1.9% margin.
As it began to transpire that exit polls by the Irish Times and national broadcaster RTE which predicted the landslide result were accurate, Smyth said she was stunned.
“It was incredibly important, and it would not have happened if we hadn’t pushed for that question to be put to the people,” she added. “We knew some years ago that this needed to happen.”
Smyth was with fellow activists at Together for Yes’s central Dublin headquarters when the exit polls came through on Friday night and the weight of a tense and fraught campaign began to lift.
“People were just weeping with relief and I suppose pleasure that we had achieved something so extraordinary,” she told us.
Smyth also said she felt relieved by the result. “Absolute relief that we had succeeded in doing this because it means so much to women and to Ireland as a whole, but particularly to women – the women who have travelled and the women who will travel in the coming days,” she continued.
Since 1983, an estimated 170,000 women have travelled from Ireland to England to get an abortion. Many more will continue to do so in coming months as Ireland’s government finalises new legislation for abortion and puts provision in place, which is not expected to be completed before the end of this year. Smyth hopes that even those women will travel with “a little bit less heaviness in their hearts – regret of course that they don’t quite make it – but nonetheless that sense that we are really valued as people”.
When we met Smyth on Thursday, just hours before polls opened the following morning, she was apprehensive about how people might vote.
“I am so nervous I can barely speak anymore,” she told us as we walked around Merrion Square park, where canvassers where frantically handing out Yes badges and leaflets to office workers eating their lunch in the sun. Overhead, the official No campaign, Save the 8th, flew an aeroplane trailing a banner that read: “Save babies. Save Both. Vote No.”
“I hope, I hope I hope that we will have done enough to convince enough people to come out and vote Yes,” she continued. “If we haven’t I will be very sad and disappointed, but we won’t be going away anywhere, because women’s lives, women’s choices, women’s dignity and choices really depend on this.”
The referendum campaign, which began formally in March, had been tense throughout. Early on, there was speculation about foreign interference, with Facebook and Google eventually taking drastic measures to ban ads relating to the campaign from outside of Ireland. The Yes campaign also expressed fear of being hugely outspent by their opponents, who were backed by long-established anti-abortion groups in Ireland, and declared a campaign budget of almost half a million euros.
“They’re really peripheral issues that tend to take over the narrative, and of course they did,” Smyth said.
But grassroots support for the Yes side gradually started to become apparent when an online fundraising campaign in April which had a target of 50,000 euros in a week to put campaign posters up in Dublin ended up raising over 100,000 euros in just hours.
“I was traveling on a train up from Kerry and by Limerick it was already at 20,000 euros,” Smyth said. “By the time I got to Dublin it was at 75,000 and then 100,000 – a phenomenal amount by the end of that day.”
Out on the doorstep, a growing support for liberalising abortion law also seemed to be emerging, something BuzzFeed News also encountered during an evening with Together for Yes in Roscommon, which despite previously considered to be Ireland’s most conservative county, voted to repeal the eighth with 57% of the vote.
“The big surprise has been how welcoming people have been around the country,” Smyth continued.
“And we’re very aware that there has a been a considerable no vote, or a shy vote as well. But at the same time, we really didn’t encounter the viciousness and the rather brutal behaviour that those of us who were involved in previous campaigns did.”
1983’s Eighth Amendment referendum was notorious for vicious campaigning on both sides, but Smyth said a changed Ireland has meant that things have been much more respectful this time around.
“People say things like Ireland’s a different country now but it’s not just a different country, it’s truly as if it’s a different planet,” she said.
"I’m not even sure if we were on a planet at all in 1983,” she added, laughing.
Better education and a better connection with outside perspectives via the internet had contributed to this shift, Smyth believed.
“There’s more understanding, there’s more empathy, there’s more awareness,” she said. “The world view is very different now.”
In 2012, the death of 31-year-old Savita Halappanava, who died of septicaemia in Galway after a foetal heartbeat meant doctors failed to intervene as she experienced a miscarriage, caused national outrage at the impact the Eighth Amendment had on pregnant women, and proved a crucial turning point Ireland’s fight for abortion rights. Six years later, when abortion laws were relaxed this weekend, people left heartfelt notes at a mural of Savita in Dublin. “I’m sorry you had to give your life to this,” one read.
Smyth said the public reaction to Halappanava’s death was an indication that Irish attitudes to abortion had changed.
“It wasn’t something that could be brushed under the carpet and denied anymore,” she said.
“People in this country were very clear that this should not have happened, and the cry at the time was 'Never Again'.”
The following year what Smyth describes as “a very minimal law” – the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act – was passed to allow abortion when a mother’s life was at immediate risk, but campaigners believed legislations needed to go much further. Smyth set up the Coalition to Repeal the 8th with the intention of elevating the abortion-rights message beyond the discourse of activism in order to reach the whole of Ireland.
“Not because pro-choice didn’t matter, but to win a referendum in this country, you need to be bigger than you are, bigger than yourself,” she said. "You have to move out and get the whole country involved.”
Reflecting on the victory for Repeal on Sunday, Smyth said the “real revolution” was that the Irish people had voted so resoundingly in favour of women’s right to choose, despite an aggressive and emotive campaign from the anti-abortion side, which chastised “abortion on demand”, and regularly described the “killing” of a foetus at six months gestation, or a 9 week embryo’s ability to “kick, yawn and stretch”.
“It was personally incredibly satisfying for me as a feminist that we ran it as a feminist campaign,” she said.
“We were very particular to speak with people in ways that they would be able to engage with, but we were very clear that this was about women throughout and we didn’t give way on that, we absolutely didn’t. I think that’s the real revolution.”
When the referendum result was officially declared on Saturday, Varadkar said that a “quiet revolution” had happened in Ireland.
“I was immediately running around after all the women I know saying ‘it doesn’t have to be quiet anymore, we can make it a noisy revolution if we want!’,” Smyth said.
And there is plenty she plans to continue to be noisy about – not least ensuring the government pass the proposed abortion legislation as quickly as possible, but fighting for other causes such as ending violence against women, or tackling poverty, which she said disproportionately affects women in Ireland.
“There is still obviously so much work that needs doing, and one of the difficulties I’ve had over the years is every time you turn to do other things, you were always conscious that the Eighth Amendment was there as the great unsolved problem,” she said.
“We’d have to come back to it again and again and again until it was finally solved, when we could have been out doing other things.”