Book length histories of the Repeal referendum have started to appear. That this second one is an autobiography is in itself a testament to how long the 8th Amendment ruled over us. The 8th amendment takes up about half the space of Peter Boylan’s ‘In the Shadow of the 8th’. Boylan was an obstetrician who retired from Holles St in 2016, he was a prominent spokesperson for Repeal in the referendum of 2018 and was then central to the implementation of abortion access in the aftermath of winning that referendum. In telling the story of his medical career he tells the story of how the 8th shaped it.
The publication of the co-directors history of the Together for Yes (T4Y) campaign is an important step in building an accessible collective history of the final stage of the long struggle to repeal the hated 8th amendment to the Irish constitution. It along with the forthcoming Together for Yes review of the referendum campaign should probably be read by everyone who worked for Repeal, if for no other reason than to get a better understanding of the ‘big picture’ of what we were involved in.
On 25th May 2018 Ireland voted by 2 to 1 to remove the ban on abortion from the Irish constitution. This massive victory came after years of grassroots campaigning demanding that the government call such a referendum and then a very intense 68 days of campaigning where 1000s of volunteers threw everything they had into winning. For 30 years before that I campaigned and wrote about that struggle and in the years since I’ve started to try to capture the learnings from that moment of change from a specifically anarchist perspective. This is an index of that material and an appeal to those anarchists who were involved to consider doing an audio interview with me that can further add to this story.
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 
Last night we were at the launch of ‘We’ve come a long way; Reproductive rights of migrants and ethnic minorities in Ireland.’ The books a collection of 16+ pieces by authors from migrant or ethnic minority backgrounds living in Ireland written in the context of the successful decades long struggle to Repeal the 8th Amendment.