The vote to remove the ban on abortion from the Irish constitution in May 2018 was overwhelmingly carried, with almost 2 out of every 3 voters voting Yes remove the ban. The margin of victory was such that some post-referendum polemics made the mistake of arguing that victory was always inevitable, that the campaign didn’t matter. Such arguments tended to be made by opinion writers who never liked the Repeal campaign and in some cases published pieces during the campaign arguing that unless whatever aspect they disliked was dropped the referendum would be lost.
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 
