I wrote the following text in November 2012 to have ready in case a smear campaign directed at the freshly renewed pro-choice movement in Ireland gained any real traction beyound the media stories mentioned below. I didn’t publish it at the time as it failed to get traction and thus this would, at best, have been a distraction from the organising work being done, work that was going to succeed in a few short years in overturning Ireland’s ban on abortion access through the Repeal referendum in May 2018. The smear was built around an email I had sent as rumours of the death of a women having died in a Galway hopital after being denied an abortion spread amongst pro-choice activists and was basically just me proposing we have a meeting to organise a protest if this turned out to be true and the family did not object. My main concern was that the anti-choice activists and their pet journalists would work out who I was and concoct a weird conspiracy story through misrepresenting my long activity as an anarchist in Ireland and elsewhere in a somewhat similar fashion to the way they has used the involvement of individual republicans to smear Shell to Sea a few years previously.
In a pattern all to common across rural Ireland hundreds of Yes posters were torn down in an organised fashion by what had to be No activists across Country Cork last night. This anti-democratic rage typifies the No campaign which has has so much wealth that it is printing 10 No posters to every Yes. All across Ireland the few Yes posters there are to distribute have been torn down, in one case we have heard of in the west they have even been discovered in the houses of No campaigners. This is ahead of the May 25th referendum to remove the article of the Irish constitution that equates the life of a women with that of a foetus.
Over the last few days the mainstream media in Ireland has finally woken up to the way money from far right US evangelicals is being used to buy the No vote in the referendum campaign. Here we show you how to see how you are being targeted and discuss what this means for the referendum and any conception of democracy not based on the ‘one dollar, one vote’ favoured by the elite.