Writer: Andrew Flood
Articles by Andrew N Flood
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.
This is a collection of four pieces we wrote during the Turkish invasion of Afrin and the two month defence of the tiny canton against NATOs second biggest army. A desperate struggle in which almost 900 SDF fighters were killed by Turkish airpower and military trying to defend the Rojava revolution. These reports were originally published on our Facebook page and are presented here as published.
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.
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 Turkish invasion of revolutionary Rojava has now entered its 17th day. NATO’s 2nd largest army has failed to achieve any significant breakthrough against the defenders of Afrin despite deploying some of the most advanced tanks, helicopters, artillery and jet bombers. On our graphic the small map at top centre shows Turkey in orange, the tiny blue area under Turkey is the canton of Afrin, the target of this invasion and one of the 3 original cantons of the Rojava revolution. These cantons are where the experiment in direct democracy, gender equality, and sustainability began in 2012 in the most impossible conditions of the Syrian civil war and the ISIS invasion of two of the cantons.
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.
The delaying is almost over and a date for a referendum to finally overturn the 8th amendment has almost been confirmed. But – as expected – the government are now publicly threatening to present a wording other than the one needed – a vote to remove the anti-choice Article 40.3.3.
The media are reporting that the government are instead trying to somehow present a referendum that would include the terms abortion could be accessed under. Essentially the overwhelmingly old, male and conservative government do not want to follow the recommendations given by the very body they set up to avoid such responsibility. The creation of the Citizens Assembly was clearly imagined by the government as a way a new, very restrictive, anti-choice regime could be created in the aftermath of the referendum and presented as ‘the people’s will’.
However it turned out when 100 random people heard weeks of expert testimony they decided the reasonable moderate position was the one where restrictions on pregnant people would be removed or at least minimised. To the anti-choice extremists in power this was unexpected, they were only willing to concede movement on the very edges of the extreme anti-choice laws under which pregnant people and doctors face a 14 year jail sentence.