Repealing It
On the train to Holyhead I saw the first Repeal jumpers I’d seen in months. “What’s all this?” asked the man opposite me. “Tomorrow there’s a vote in Ireland to repeal the 8th amendment,” I said. I was caught off guard that he didn’t know: that it was possible to take a ferry to Dublin on May 24th and not know this. “If it passes, the government will legislate for abortion.” An older woman leaned over the seat behind me with her phone raised: “I’m documenting it,” she announced. “I’m from the North, I can’t vote, but I’m going over in support.” A girl pushed aside a plastic container of sushi and stood awkwardly, smiling, as the woman snapped her picture. “I don’t have a jumper on,” I said, “but I’m going over too.” I smiled and she photographed me. She travelled up and down the aisle, collecting smiles on film: practical ones, smiles with grit, lettuce-flecked smiles, teary flashes.
That night in Dublin, I met a Canadian poet on a street near my house.
“You were away, weren’t you?” she said.
I told her I had been, but I’d come back in time to vote, and that by chance the 25th was my birthday. We stopped and talked for longer than we ever had before, a dusting of rain settling on our hair. She gave me a Repeal badge to match hers. Men who passed kept greeting us, as if to indicate they’d be voting yes or perhaps just to acknowledge that the next day our fate would be decided by majority vote. She didn’t have citizenship and couldn’t vote, she said, but she’d done the best she could to mobilise those who could, organising a literary reading with all proceeds going to the Yes campaign.
“I love Dublin,” she said. “I came for a year and that was six years ago. But it’s been strange to accept that my right to live here comes at the expense of my right to make decisions about my own body.”
I agreed. I have Irish and American citizenship: I moved to Dublin four years ago. We stood talking in the faint rain for half an hour. There should be a word for this: when people repeat to one another what they already know as a bulwark against prospective injustice. I longed to invite her to the nearest pub, where we might continue affirming what we both believed, emanating that conviction like an airborne drug. It’s a profoundly unsettling feeling, this waiting to find out what the people you’ve stood behind in Tesco or opened doors for really think of you.
I voted on the morning of May 25th in the company of my best friend, a Russian-Estonian who can’t vote despite having lived in Ireland longer than I have. The man who handed me my ballot paper smiled, and his smile was like those of the men on the street the night before. In the booth I stared for a long time at the ballot paper. There were two boxes and I had to mark an X in the box that indicated whether or not I agreed with repealing the 8th Amendment. It seemed too simple and I was afraid of marking the wrong box or invalidating my vote in some way. Perhaps because of the simplicity of the process or else the historicity of the moment, I felt overwhelmed by emotion. I thought of how, last year, the corpses of 800 infants were discovered in a sewer under an abandoned mother-and-baby home in Tuam. The discovery had illuminated a painful hypocrisy in how my adopted country has viewed the worth of a foetus’s life: priceless in the womb, with its power to shame and inhibit the mother, but once born, left to die of neglect in record numbers. This isn’t the image of Ireland that Americans like me tend to picture when we speak of recovering our roots, but this legacy weighs down the country and I could feel that weight in the polling station on May 25th. I don’t think I ever felt more connected to Ireland that when I dropped my vote to repeal in the box and went out to where my friend was waiting.
On the night of May 25th, the magic word was ‘landslide’. I saw it when the first exit poll came in, just as I was leaving the house. Some friends were gathering in a local arts space, not so much to celebrate, but to be with each other. When I arrived it was already full of people who’d campaigned tirelessly for months, some for years. Landslide. The second exit poll was announced while I sat outside with an Irish friend — a friend who, the first time we got a drink together, described in a gamble of intimacy her own abortion, which she’d endured alone with pills, telling no one, clinging to the edge of the bathtub in excruciating pain, terrified she was dying. “I had these thoughts,” she’d said, “grotesque fears I thought I’d banished forever, about sin and shame and what I deserved.” We sat outside and the night was dark and fine; around us people smoked and we talked about books and travel and then loud cheers broke like a storm and sundered the conversation. We ran inside and everyone was hugging and crying and a girl joked that she’d promised to get the result tattooed on her body, but the exit poll had predicted 69% for yes, so she was laughing and so was my friend and our eyes kept darting to the screen and the word ‘landslide’. There was the sense of something we had known and hoped for a long time confirmed, that a different Ireland was ours to choose.
