My #RepealThe8th: Part III
On the 23rd of March this year, twenty-one fucking years after I wrote the article in the UCC paper, my wife and I attended a meeting on a very rainy night in a small upstairs room in Hearn’s Hotel in Clonmel for people who wanted to repeal the Eighth Amendment. They were called Tipp For Choice and had recently joined up with the national umbrella campaign called Together For Yes.
This was very uncomfortable for me, because I react badly to being around other people, but my wife convinced me that it was the right thing to do. If I was going to write dozens of blog posts, and write letters to the paper of record, and I very definitely was going to do those things, then I should probably do something in the real world.
What spilled most people over into at least understanding the pro-choice position was the case of Savita Halappanavar, who died of sepsis due to “legal uncertainty regarding the precise circumstances” under which she would be given an abortion. In other words, there is no doubt that the Eighth Amendment killed Savita Halappanavar.
What spilled me over into moving my twenty-one year campaign from my keyboard to the streets was the Noel Pattern controversy.
It’s not uncommon for the pro-life brigade to throw around all sorts of lies and misinformation and deceptive statistics, in a way that you just won’t find with pro-choice arguments, but this was something else.
The TL;DR is that John McGuirk, the self-aggrandising communications director for one of the main pro-life campaigns, Save The Eighth, promoted Noel Pattern as a nurse who worked in an operating theatre and who had seen some terrible things that he felt obliged to share through the medium of billboards. He lied about his qualifications, his police record and a bunch of other stuff. While these lies were being uncovered by Nurse Polly, McGuirk kept pushing the same line, using increasingly threatening and dismissive language. Eventually he stopped talking about it, but there was never any admission of fault or apology of any kind. Pattern was simply removed from the literature and we never heard about him again.
I remember thinking at the time that if the pro-life people felt so privileged and comfortable that they could adopt such an imperious attitude in contradiction of established, easily-verifiable facts, what the hell would they pull out of their asses when it came to nuanced positions on women’s healthcare issues?
The following week I published a basic pro-choice explainer on Medium to directly and simply address the main concerns I was hearing about the repeal of the Eighth Amendment.
The week after that, we attended the meeting.
This is a photo of that March meeting. Bright and shiny, front left is Anita, who would turn out to be the beating heart of the Clonmel branch of Together For Yes.
The guy reading the leaflet front right is Seamus Healy, one of our Tipperary TDs. Sitting right down the middle at the back next to Andrea, is Pat English, a county councillor who works with Seamus Healy. These men would prove instrumental both in determining the logistics of how best to allocate our resources, and physically walking and driving the streets and roads of Clonmel and its hinterland to put those plans into effect.
There are other people in the photo (and Emma, not in the photo because she’s on the other side of the camera) who I would get to know much better as we applied ourselves to the campaign.
I came to the meeting to donate my skill set, which is writing and vicious sarcasm. I was expecting a certain combative, revolutionary mood among the feminists of Tipperary; I was ready for a fight, to burn shit to the ground and salt the goddamn earth.
I was wrong about everything.
Next: My #RepealThe8th: Part IV
