Perhaps out of frustration with their failure on last night’s Late Late Show (Apr 27th), the anti-choice No campaigns have stooped to a disgusting new low today. We’ve observed that they have been engaged in setting up apparently innocuous Facebook news pages and we presumed it was in connection with the referendum. Today they changed the cover image of one of these pages to make it look like a Yes campaign page and then posted this disgusting post.
Over the course of the referendum I wrote several long pieces analysing opinion polls as they appeared in the newspapers to glean useful information about how the campaign for a Yes vote was doing, where we were stong, what weakenesses existed and what tactics this information suggested. I’ve gathered all these pieces together below in reverse order, the first has a lot of details on methodology and context that is not repeated in the later pieces.
The polls appear to have been very accurate in particular those carried out by Red C and also Behaviours and Attitude. Both companies showed likely results very close to the final outcome (66.4% Yes) if you presume the Yes campaign won most of the Don’t Knows over the 3 months between the start of serious campaigning around March 8th and the referendum in June.
We’ve seen a number of Irish journalists wondering if Cambridge Analytica style tactics could be part of repeal referendum. In fact they already are and have been for over a year – we are going to demonstrate this in what follows.
A few thoughts on the start of the #repealthe8th campaign. Commentators who thought the anti-choice side were better organised because they went full throttle faster should reconsider – how much damage have they done to themselves with fake stories, fake 100s crowds & neo-nazi smears. At this stage they must be wishing they had done & said nothing over the last week & instead focused on fact checking & claims that could stand 30 seconds scrutiny. If you are pro-choice you should reconsider anything presenting the campaigns as if it was a apolitical horse race – focus on the issues and not on performance.
Saturday March 10th saw an anti-choice march pass through Dublin, part of their campaign to try to maintain the status quo where pregnant people and doctors can be jailed for 14 years for taking abortion pills in this country while others are denied control of their own maternity care. Polls show that few people support this position and its ‘let women die’ implications so the anti-choice campaign is trying to create the fiction of mass support in the hope that people will be more inclined to vote No.
Aware of this, WSM decided to put together a team to go out and document the march for ourselves including physically counting everyone who marched and using other techniques that give a good estimate of the numbers marching. Below we will bring you through the results of each of these counts and estimates but the headline item is that when the organisers claimed 100k had marched this was a blatant lie that we will show is even physically impossible. We counted 8930 marchers. All of the other methods we used also limited the maximum size of the march to less than 15,000.
A large anti-choice march will pass through Dublin today and the organisers will attempt to massively exagerate the number taking part as part of their campaign to keep the hated anti-women 8th amendment. WSM will be there providing a count of the real numbers of people marching and we would strongly encourage our supporters to retweet and share the results as well as challenging any false exaggerated reporting of the numbers you may see. Along with the rest of the pro-choice movement we are not mounting a counter-protest this year, we will simply be there to observe and to count. From 14.00 track @wsmireland on twitter and keep an eye on our Facebook pages, in particular Solidarity Times which will carry a livestream from around 2.15.
Graphic – how many people can be crammed in at rock concert density on Merrion square.
The evening of March 8th evening saw thousands march through Dublin for Internationals Womens Day but also to demand Repeal of the 8th Amendment which bans abortion in Ireland. The governement have finally been forced to call a referendum to get rid of the 8th – speakers at the rally at the end talked about how this could come about and the formation of a new organisation to joinly campaign for repeal. Demonstrations and other events took place across Ireland to mark this.
The announcement that there will be a referendum to Repeal the hated 8th amendment is the product of decades of active campaigning. Pro-choice campaigners built for repeal ever since the referendum was passed in 1983. If at first this seemed like a distant demand now repeal looks by far the most likely outcome in May. The story of how this happened illustrates how change comes in general. That is not through elections but through people getting organised to demand that change, regardless of which politicians happen to be running the show in any particular year.
The March for Choice saw another another sinister anti-choice video crew in operation. The last time on investigation they turned out to be an far-right crew who subsequently worked with Tommy Robinson, ex leader of the EDL. This time the accents were American rather than British and on investigation we discovered they are an extremist anti-choice church, one of this crew has even told media they want women who have had abortions to be executed. [Video report]
As with the previous crew their method is to try and get participants to agree to be interviewed without revealing their extreme anti-choice views. As you will see in the video when challenged as to who they are they tried to vaguely pass themselves off as a TV studio and then Facebook stream. When people agreed to be interviewed after a few sympathetic appearing questions they were suddenly ambushed with very hostile language in the hope that their targets either don’t notice or get flustered. The goal is to then broadcast edited footage of flustered or hostile pro-choice people to try and dehumanise us and urge their own followers to fanaticism.
Saturday the 30th of September 2017 will go down as a high point in the fight for abortion rights in the Republic, and that is a struggle that stretches back decades. Years of campaigning and maintaining a focus on the issue, saw a massive crowd of nearly 30,000 people take to the streets for the annual March for Choice as organised by the Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC). The calls are for action, and the need for Repeal of the 8th Amendment.