i. today was just the day when all the numbers changed
When it’s all over, really, I’m by myself. At home – “home” home, not home base – in my parents’ house, not long off the late train from Galway. I’d voted in Galway that morning. On the way, nervous, quickly divesting myself of Yes and Lawyers for Choice paraphernalia, I’d wondered if I’d cry. I didn’t. I couldn’t stop smiling.
I’m not sure where the rest of the day went; next thing I know, I’m sat in my childhood bedroom and it’s 9.50pm. The exit polls are about to be released. I’m thinking we have it, but maybe by a margin of about 3%. 55%, if we’re lucky; 58%, if I let my imagination run away with me.
By the time the figures are announced on the Late Late Show, they’ve been online for several minutes. My mother calls me, have you seen? 69.4%!
I can’t speak. I genuinely can’t form words.
ii. the notion of a nation we now get to build
The words I have poured into this campaign, though. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve used up several years’ worth of words in one go. It’s been a river of language, a vast storm system of the stuff. Drunk with words, laden with meanings, I look up from my screen and feel at once smaller than I ever have and yet connected to a web of women all sending our thoughts into the ether, searching for someone to say yes, yes, I hear you, you are real. Your thoughts are valid.
I imbue words with a particular weight because semantics is the lawyer’s playing field of choice. We love words. We love reading things in context, and contemporaneously, and in the light of prevailing ideas and concepts. What, then, is 2018? 2018 is the year that the people of Ireland decided that the words in the foundational document of our country were not fit for purpose; that read in the light of the twenty-first century, Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution was a national embarrassment and deserved to be consigned to the history books.
Ireland’s legal system is founded on the principle of Constitutional supremacy: there is no law higher than the Constitution and it cannot be overturned. What is written in that text therefore forms the mainframe of Irish law. On the campaign trail, I often used the analogy of a house: within the house, you can decorate in whatever way you wish, but if the roof is eight feet tall, you can’t fit a ten-foot Christmas tree into it.
Like all created things, Ireland is, at its core, a story. Our modern narrative was born in revolution and forged out of the fellowship of rebels of all genders who campaigned for independence through repression and war. The 1916 Proclamation of Independence and the 1922 Irish Free State Constitution explicitly recognise the rights and contributions of Irishmen and Irishwomen. However, by the time the 1937 Constitution was written, the spirit of the times had changed and the narrative of glorious Celtic mythicism and storied heroes found itself twisted to meet the needs of a conservative government and a rising Catholic church. Women were relegated to a ‘special status’; it was made clear that the subject of Irish law had a gender, and that gender was male. With every new repression – illegality of contraception, legality of marital rape, mandatory retirement from the public sector at marriage – it became more evident that the women of Ireland were second class citizens, confined to our bodies and by our bodies. By the time of the passage of the Eighth Amendment, even those bodies were no longer our own.
iii. the second job of citizenry
But another narrative runs through the blood and the brains of Irish women, a lineage that calls back to the days of Queen Maebh and Brigid of Kildare; the spirit of Constance Markievicz’ exhortation to leave their jewels in the bank and buy boots and a revolver. Irish women were ready, and when the call came, they rose.
I felt it, the electricity in the air at the Marches for Choice in Dublin city centre. I felt it while addressing a lecture hall full of students in Cork and in every smile exchanged with a fellow Repeal jumper wearer, the secret flicker of the eye to the Yes badge on my lapel and the nod: she’s in. You’re in. We’re in.
Most of all, I felt it all the time I got to spend with my fellow Lawyers for Choice, an organised chaos of academics, solicitors, and barristers; comrades and heroes one and all. Working off the clock, distracted from our Real Jobs by this volunteer group that was suddenly our Very Real Job, travelling and writing late into the night, we ran on caffeine and adrenaline right to the wire. It’s difficult to describe the kind of camaraderie you develop in a tight-knit group under extreme pressure, but there are thousands of people around Ireland who’ll understand because their canvassing or advocacy or friendship groups became the focal point of their lives for several months in the spring of 2018. They’ll tell you that they get it. They’ll tell you that you had to be there.
iv. the thanks I get is to take all this shit for you
Vignette: I am standing in the sun in Tuam, Co. Galway. It is the last weekend of the campaign. I am wearing a Lawyers for Choice badge and a t-shirt which will ill-advisedly add to the campaign sunburn I can still see in certain lights. I am standing in the sunlight at a crossroads holding my leaflets and wearing my particular campaign smile.
There is a young man standing about a foot from me, bellowing in my face.
He is telling me that I am a failure of an academic because he disapproves of our not footnoting our plain-English explanatory leaflet.
It takes me a lot longer than it should to walk away.
v. come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
I get to experience – no, that’s not enough. I get to live inside the campaign discourse in a very particular way. I have a secret identity.
In early 2016 Ruth asks me if I’d like to take care of the Lawyers for Choice twitter feed. I’m a beginning PhD student and I’ve only been in the group a few months; I am both thrilled and a little intimidated, but I start and it’s brilliant.
I sometimes experience a certain amount of (hopefully) affectionate fun-poking for my internet life, but I can’t deny it – Twitter is a medium I instinctively get. Twitter is democratic and viral. It can be as impactful as you make it. Twitter allows for banter and photo sharing and friendship formation, but where I see the most potential is as a medium for education. I love to teach, love to see students grasping principles and learning the subtle logic of the law. But law isn’t just for classrooms and courtrooms; law is made by the people and in turn it shapes us. And law like the Eighth Amendment is something people feel, before they have the words for it. For or against, abortion law is visceral. It forces us to confront our feelings about the deepest parts of ourselves; makes us think about stresses and breaking points: of our relationships and our families and our bodies.
The challenge, then, is to engage and inform without taking away from, or distancing people from, this instinctive interest. So I settle in. I crack jokes, I do layman’s terms threads, I answer questions. I discover that there is no underestimating the lack of knowledge amid the public about the Constitution and the legal system. (Over the past few years, in my head, I’ve rewritten about five separate CSPE curriculums for schools.) But the lack of knowledge doesn’t imply either a lack of interest or a lack of ability – in fact, the @LfC followers are engaged and acute and very quickly law-literate. We do Irish law and international law; we talk about the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations. When the Mellet and Whelan decisions come down from the UN Human Rights Committee, we go through the findings and point out the standards Ireland is breaching. We do more or less a Fundamentals of the Irish Legal System course over the months – separation of powers, legislative process, hierarchy of laws, our interactions with the international bodies, fundamental rights in the Constitution. And we do it all with humour, with gifs, with frequent requests that people send us dog pictures.
And then the deliberative process begins for real around the potential for a referendum and law reform, and out of some misguided and possibly masochistic whim, we decide to livetweet it – partially as note-taking, partially as communication. What we do not expect is that it becomes a virtual meeting-place, news studio, and lecture hall all at once. The Citizens’ Assembly, the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the 8th Amendment, and the Oireachtas deliberations, via the medium of twitter, become a feature of our lives and our followers’ weeks. What this means in practice is that I (most often – or Máiréad, or Ruth, or Gearóidín) spend a lot of time sitting on my sofa, hopped up on espresso, sometimes loudly cursing into the empty room, and typing until my hands beg me to let them fall off. I become familiar with TDs of whom – with apologies – I’ve never heard. I become familiar with procedural rules about which I do not care, still. I learn the hard way that trying to keep up with certain Senators once they’re off on one is a fool’s errand. I invent the Mullen Stream of Consciousness style of tweet.
All through it, in another tab, our notifications stream is updating too fast for my browser to handle. People laughing, people asking questions and for clarifications, people bemoaning their bad luck in being represented by these luadhramáns. Kerry, Tipperary, Louth, and the entire alumni population of NUI are loudest among those. We listen to the testimonies of experts before the JOC and talk through their facts, point to sources when we find them. We sit in collective tears as the representatives of Terminations for Medical Reasons discuss their harrowing experiences seeking abortion in England. We fact-check claims and call out bogus remarks. Some Senators and TDs are following along. It’s a little thrilling to interact.
Under the handle of LfC, a nebulous dispenser of sarcasm and information, I am braver and brasher than I can ever be as me. People respond to me/us/it – I raise a crisis alert one day because I have run out of biscuits. People offer to send me biscuits. I love twitter more each week.
It’s not easy. It’s frustrating, time-consuming, saddening. By the end of a Committee session I am exhausted from the flow of information, the speed of the interactions, and the heavy weight of a lot of the testimonies. They talk about women dying, about losing wanted pregnancies, about trying to quantify risks to pregnant people’s health. They try to quantify how suicidal is suicidal enough, how close to the brink of sepsis and death can you let a person go before you allow her a termination. I want to throw my laptop out the window. They talk about how there isn’t that much child abuse happening in Ireland. I swear to myself I’ll never go on the internet again. They announce an extra sitting the next day. I sigh and promise twitter I’ll be there.
From the livetweeting I develop a new sense of the relationship between population and law, something which deepens my theoretical understanding of the field as well as making me a better educator. I learn to simplify concepts into 280 characters while getting the information across accurately. I make friends, too. @LfC establishes an ongoing banter with some of our fellow professional groups, something which strengthens us as a campaign. I hope we contribute in some part toward the number of people who say human rights law was one of their reasons for voting Yes. And it’s good craic.
I seriously do consider defenestrating my laptop during some McGrath monologues. But I wouldn’t swap the job. It’s the biggest contribution I make to the campaign, @LfC social media. Sometimes it feels like my only contribution, but if that’s true, I make it count. I have to make it count.
vi. I know you’ve got a little life in you yet
I don’t look back fondly on 2018. The campaign ate up the spring to all intents and purposes, but at home I was dealing with a severe relapse of chronic health issues with all the attendant fuss and worries. I remember it mostly through a haze of exhaustion and medicated fuzziness. Days of monotone rain lashing my windows and nights of crushing panic that the referendum would fail and it would be My Fault. Or that it would pass, and I would be watching from the sidelines, too ill to work, unneeded and unnoticed. I pour all my negative feelings about myself and my illnesses into my feelings about the campaign, and I don’t notice until it’s over and I feel like crying every time someone tells me I should be proud.
I’m not the only one. Stories start coming out. Canvassers phoning home, phoning each other, in tears after being berated or disappointed. A colleague who couldn’t face speaking about Repeal again until asked to for a talk six months later. Worries about jobs, parenting, relationships. The constant weight of anti-choice rhetoric and insults and posters and being called a murderer and stony silences across dinner tables.
Picking up my PhD again and wondering who this stranger was, who wrote so eloquently on a topic entirely unrelated to repealing the bloody Eighth Amendment. Wondering how long it would take me to become her again.
vii. one day like this a year would see me right
And then there were the gorgeous, technicolour moments, and it was worth it. (Was it? Was it worth it all? It was.) Standing at a stall by the Spanish Arch in blazing sunshine while a band played Stand By Me. Laughing until I ached at the Twitter responses to our livetweets. Watching the Radical Queers and the Angels for Repeal show up in a carnival of Pride flags and Irish flags and banners to block out graphic photos held by anti-choicers. An old man leaning his head in close, inviting confidences, and saying “it’s not right. You should have your choice.” A woman my parents’ age saying her vote was for her baby granddaughter’s future.
And then the day of the count, the wall of noise entering the RDS, shuffling ballots and excited campaigners and impatient reporters. Dodging cameramen and meeting Repealers I’d only known through the internet but who were already friends and giving a year’s worth of hugs in an hour. Roars of approval when campaign leaders walked in. A photo of Savita, poignantly, hanging in a corner – later hidden from view. A whole gaggle of Lawyers for Choice, dispersing and reuniting around the hall within the crowd’s Brownian motion. A moment where it’s all too much and I find myself sitting down outside the scrum, teary-eyed, until my friends come and find me again.
We’re carried to the Together for Yes reception in the flow of people – more uproar, more jubiliation, and Katie and I end up sitting on the floor of the hotel drinking white wine and wondering when this became our lives and whether it’ll ever be normal again. Later, some of the group go to Dublin Castle for the official announcement, but for a handful of us the day’s been enough already. I finish up the afternoon reclining against sofa cushions in Katie’s house, a snoring French bulldog supine in my lap, and I look up at the ceiling, and realise we made it –
and for the first time in months, I feel like I can breathe.
viii. when love became an act of defiance
January 2019. Since New Year’s Eve this post has been sitting at the edge of my consciousness much as the tab has been sitting in my browser. Every time I sit down to write my actual research notes, I can’t concentrate until I add something to this. What is it, this compulsion toward narrative? Is it the new year making me pensive or is it a need to cleanse all of this from my brain? I make only one resolution for this year – I will finish my PhD thesis. My wall planner is new, blindingly white, alternately a warning and a promise when I consider its boxes. There will be no campaigning turning my life upside down in 2019. I miss it. Theoretically.
The referendum wasn’t the end of the story, of course. The Oireachtas debates drag on for weeks and weeks, and the anti-choicers who know they’ve lost attempt to filibuster the Bill out of existence. They relitigate the same points over and over – so I livetweet the same points over and over until it’s enough and I refuse to publicise them any more. The Seanad presides over the last stage of debate. It’s filibuster city. I stay awake until 1.30am one night and they’re still talking when I fall asleep. They get up and come in the next morning anyway and do it all over again. When it finally, finally passes, I’m at the laptop and I follow the closing speeches from the pro-choice stalwarts who are seeing the culmination of decades of work. @LfC, for all her snarky bravado, is a bit misty while tweeting this (then Ivana Bacik gives us a mention in her closing speech, and @LfC sheds a full-on tear or two).
The Bill has a rake of problems; there’s nothing stopping protests at clinics yet; people from Northern Ireland will face large fees to access abortion down south. We know this, but at the same time, it’s like a heavy weight has been lifted off me. It’s not enough, but it’s so much more. We’ll fix the problems. We can work on this now, we can talk about abortion openly, we can walk people to the doctor past the protesters with our heads held high. We’re not hiding in the shadows any more.
I would like to stop thinking about abortion law for a while. I would like to stop thinking for a while, full stop. In autumn 2018 I take a leave of absence from my PhD for a few weeks. 2018 has been a heavy year. Illness, referendum, research, teaching, more referendum, dealing with the deferred grief over losing my grandmother in 2017. My brain is tired. I go home to my family and hang out with my dog; I read a lot of consequence-free mystery novels; I sit on Nimmo’s Pier in the sun on the last good Saturday of autumn.
And of course, then the Oireachtas debates start and I have to put my lawyer hat back on again. But that, I’m coming to understand, is life.
Sandra Duffy 