The old saying has it that “history is written by the victors” and that certainly appears to be the case when it comes to the recent history of abortion in Ireland. A look at some of the major archival efforts around the repeal of the eighth amendment reveals a serious lack of pro-life representation, and so risks presenting a one-sided view of the past.
On the digital preservation front, the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) carried out the ‘Archiving Reproductive Health’ project, bearing the subtitle: ‘Digital Preservation of Reproductive Health Resources: Archiving the Eighth’. The project was funded by a grant of €383,481 from the Wellcome Trust, a British charity focused on health research, and led by Trinity College Dublin, Maynooth University and the Royal Irish Academy in collaboration with a number of other partners.
The project, which ran over 36 months from January 2021, aimed to provide “long-term preservation and access to the many at-risk archives generated by grassroots women’s reproductive health movements” during the 2018 referendum campaign. It set about achieving this with the help of project partners, including Together for Yes, The Abortion Rights Campaign, The Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, Terminations for Medical Reasons and In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth.
When asked by Gript whether the DRI had involved any pro-life groups in its archival work, the DRI responded that there were no pro-life groups involved in this project.
“The project was funded externally by Wellcome for a limited time. In writing the proposal we explored gaining access to opposition groups within the time frame of the project. We did not feel this would be possible and limited our proposal to one side of the campaign,” their response read.
Of the project’s contents, two collections contain pro-life materials. One is a visual collection containing 432 images of posters, both pro-life and pro-choice, which were taken during the Eighth Amendment referendum campaign. The images were taken in a variety of locations around Ireland, but mostly in Dublin. The other collection is a social media dataset containing the tweet IDs of 2,108,782 tweets related to the 2018 referendum. A check of a sample of the tweet IDs revealed a roughly even distribution of pro-life/pro-choice tweets, with many tweets no longer visible due to accounts having been deactivated or suspended.
That is the extent of the DRI’s pro-life entries. They exist alongside a number of entries for each of the above-mentioned partners, which contain hundreds of digital records of pro-choice photos, posters, flyers, testimonies and more.
Gript asked whether the DRI had any materials related to the 1983 insertion of the Eighth Amendment or pro-life activity around that time, to which the DRI responded that it did not.
A further question as to whether the DRI has any plans to collaborate with pro-life organisations in the future did not receive a response by the time of writing.
The National Museum of Ireland meanwhile had difficulties in building a pro-life collection due to what the curator of the relevant section described in an article as a poor response to public calls for materials.
“Attempts to collect other No Campaign material such as ‘No’ t-shirts and badges (which were few and difficult to source) fell short as public calls on social media platforms failed to persuade No voters to offer their objects. Similarly, private requests to No voters came to nothing,” National Museum curator Brenda Malone wrote in a 2020 issue of the Science Museum Group Journal.
A request submitted to Ms Malone for an inventory of the National Museum’s items relevant to the 2018 referendum yielded no result by the time of writing, despite assurances from Ms Malone that the Museum collected many different referendum campaign posters and that this includes many examples from the No campaign.
However, images seen by Gript of a previous 2018 referendum exhibit at Collins Barracks showed a severe imbalance in representation, with a sole pro-life flyer representing the pro-life position while multiple flyers, posters, badges and other pieces of paraphernalia represented the pro-choice campaign.
The DRI is funded by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (DFHERIS) via the Higher Education Authority (HEA) and the Irish Research Council (IRC), while the National Museum is majority funded by an annual grant received from the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.
The receipt of state funds would imply that both organisations have an obligation to be even-handed in their archival efforts. Why the National Museum didn’t contact a pro-life organisation as it was struggling to accrue pro-life materials is unclear, when it could have resulted in a more balanced collection.
Considering one-third of the Irish public voted ‘No’ in the 2018 referendum, it would be strange if this significant social movement in Ireland’s recent history were considered deserving of nothing more than an afterthought in Ireland’s museums and archives. If there is difficulty in sourcing pro-life materials, resulting in imbalanced representation, perhaps contacting pro-life institutions should be the next port of call for those tasked with preserving Ireland’s past.
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That photo symbolizes the problem with youth today. Uneducated individuals acting like gods based off stupidity. All of them completely indoctrinated through group think spread by globalists not questioning the root of it all. It is a well established fact that soros funded the yes side during the abortion referendum who is without doubt one of the most evil people in the world today and not one of them know it or would even ask why. If they did know it and his history, they would deny every single word based off nothing because they are completely and hopelessly brain washed.
Hear hear James.
Yes James and not to forget that other satanist Irish American Chuck Feeney. Well known around Limerick for throwing money at their so called Uni.as well as sponsoring any anti Irish cause.
One thing for sure, money is the rot inside our society. An after thought on this is that this is the product of our educational system, a generation of useless robots incapable of thinking for themselves. Interesting point you made because all this is the work of Satan and it’s interesting to see all the masses laugh and scoff at the idea when the evidence is all around them. People are seeing the balls of light in the sky calling them UFOs when they are actually the fallen angels. Yeshua was completely right when he said the masses would be deceived, even with the satanist in limerick throwing money at people, no questions asked of its source. We live in crazy times when all that has been written is being explained away with sudo science while the masses gobble it up as rationality because they choose not to believe what they were told by those long since gone.
How about an archive of the children who never saw the light of day because they were murdered in their mother’s wombs. Barbaric….
All the same smelly looking, hair cut with knife and fork streak of unnatural colour in hair brigade are the same people add a mask because they are cowards that show up at anything to do with women and children’s rights events or protests shouting their bile over and over. If you approach any of them ask them a simple question they will shout and scream nonsense into your face. And they are mostly snobby little brats.
The National Consensus Borg on abortion was not to be resisted. So arrogant was the campaign that it used the heart (a symbol of love) in its ’Repeal’ logo. No self-awareness whatsoever.
Even a rational pro-choice campaigner would admit that abortion is not an intrinsic human right of a moral nature. That would deny even a passing consideration of the existence in life of the foetus. At best, it is a civil right in law to accommodate a practical social need. But philosophically, it’s a contested phenomenon, and thus not by any means an act of love. So why the logo?
Part of the answer lies in the self-absorption of the pro-choice campaign, and its dogmatic belief in its own ‘rightness’. So much so that it is blind to all nuance, let alone understanding and accommodation of the other side.
This view has now crystallised into officially-sanctioned narratives, curated by a new ‘progressive’ priesthood.
I hope they archive everything to do with the pro abortion campaign. Names, claims, funding, every lie and half truth.
One day, we will win and we will open those archives, and people will face exposure and justice for the evils they have perpetrated.
Wouldn’t it be a useful “contextualisation” of all the “pro-choice” arguments made, 6 years ago, to have archived the poster or written leaflet, that was produced back then, pointing out that approx one third of the abortions, performed in the UK in 2017, were to women who had had one or more previous abortions !!!
It is a remarkable piece Jason. The erasure of truth in history. What is deeply troubling about so called pro- choice is their use of language. Choice hides the word abortion. Abortion is a medical euphemism for the verb to kill. The killing of an innocent unborn child that is denied the choice to live or die. What is equally troubling is that advocates of killing babies are always fervently anti- death penalty. The hypocrisy is sickening. The single most important pull factor for immigration is an aging population. So the same NGOs that advocate for abortion, advocate for the rights of undocumented asylum seekers from safe country countries These same groups are subsidised by the tax payer. These unelected NGOs and their allies in the media and social science departments in academia are shaping the world in which we live. Who benefits from this world view? The only beneficiary is unfettered capital. The woman seeks equality with men to join the work force. The immigrant wants work. Wildlife and our environment is being destroyed as a by product of this work. If humanity continues using this model for society it will eventually age itself into extinction. The good news is that wildlife and the environment will recover. The bad news is that these archives might survive and give some idiot the notion that this is the way to live.
If you are in that photograph/supported it , you are responsible for 10000 dead babies per year in ireland.
Taxpayers money being used to fund misinformation. Nothing new there.
A simple point to Note, and to bear in mind going forward…..
What percentage of the TOTAL ELECTORATE of Ireland Voted “YES” in the Abortion Referendum, or in any of the Referenda Since NIECE II. I would assume that NONE of the YES VOTES would have broken the Total Electorate Threshold. If this proves to have been the case, could I assume I am smelling a wee bit of Gerrymandering in the air?