The Irish Abortion Referendum

Their official count isn’t in yet but Yes. Saw reports of people putting miraculous medals in with the ballot papers - hope that counts as a spoiled vote.

Miraculous medals and novena prayers amongst ballot papers in one of the boxes from Killarney.#Kerry #8thRef pic.twitter.com/vPNU7PLttv

— Seán Mac an tSíthigh (@Buailtin) May 26, 2018

lol!

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/296/006/e90.gif

amazing

Well turned out

Well done!!!!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DeI69U7X0AExN9d.jpg

Referendums are suddenly back in fashion, not least among those who have spent the past two years trying to discredit one https://t.co/ZBKSB7AkVX

— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) May 27, 2018

Eat the book guy made several inane tweets comparing this to Brexit (everything is Brexit!) and got owned several times in the replies.

Someone referenced article 46 of our constitution, which means that the constitution can only be amended with a referendum, and he huffily dismissed it as “constitutional subtleties”! He should print his tweets off and eat them.

he is getting bodied in the replies lmao

this is heaping a lot of pressure on the self-confessed strong + stable feminist in no.10 as well, it's all good!

There's a great exchange from a month or so back where Carol Cadwalladr asks Goodwin why he's spent the past year slagging off her Cambridge Analytica story only to suddenly turn up in it.

So if i'm thinking right, what has been achieved by the referendum is that a veto on changing the law apropos abortion has been lifted and what can be said in public has been changed. The actual law that is being worked towards is only present i a sketched out form taht needs to go through debate in the Dail which could take as long as it takes. & only then will things be getting towards what the Yes side want.
& I'm not sure tow aht extent the No side can undermine all the stages up to a more stable end which the Yes side will want to be amended regularly since the heavily compromised end point is not going to where they want things to get to.

Hope enough momentum has been picked up and doesn't dissipate before we wind up at a point that resembles the 21st century more closely.
Already hearing the church complaining and hearing about the No side acting like victims.

and what can be said in public has been changed.
>
That is to say that several people have said during the campaign that it is only now possible to talk about abortion in public and actually refer to it as that.

& that the one thing the referendum has achieved without further legislative work is that the amendment which prevented any change has now been lifted which is a stage before actual change. & now the more conservative elements of the dail can try to delay any actual change from happening by keeping legislation being argued over as long as possible.

What do your sources think happened to people who said the word in public?

(This could have gone in the bad Guardian thread, but really there should be a collected bad take repository!)

Laurie Penny published a now locked piece about the referendum, it sounds like an absolute car crash. Irish twitter users have been queuing up to critique it. So much cringe. She actually used her own Irish background to deflect from the fact that she doesn’t know the difference between the Taoiseach and the Dáil!

This thread captures the worst of it:

I wrote a lot of stuff on my IG story about how bad I think this Laurie Penny article (https://t.co/4cPGQK2DKE) is, then remembered Twitter is meant to be the one for opinions.

so:

— thot experiment (@NaoiseDolan) May 28, 2018

In fairness, Laurie is pretty aware that she's fucked up:

https://twitter.com/PennyRed

She actually used her own Irish background to deflect from the fact that she doesn’t know the difference between the Taoiseach and the Dáil!

That is not something she did, no.

Yes, anyone can go on her timeline and see shite like this:

Because I’ve learned to my cost that there are some people for whom only deleting my whole account and never writing anything again would ever be enough.

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) May 29, 2018

Although I did ungenerously misrepresent the point, so yes, you’re right on that. Can’t imagine what made me view her so ungenerously!

Yeah, that is an unfortunate feature of her writing these days - to be honest any idea that starts with "I was hanging around with Amanda Palmer and she said" is unlikely to go anywhere good.

I'm actually in awe of her ability to make herself the story time and time again. Tone deaf cultural insensivity followed by frantic backtracking and apologies is kinda her MO at this point.

'Laurie Penny becoming the story' is something that's only happened because dozens of people have a weird obsession with her and have chosen to tweet about how bad this article is, though? It's weird to see so many people tweeting complaints that's she crowding out more informed/relevant voices given that most of us probably wouldn't even know that the LP piece existed if it weren't for those same tweets

that sounds like a pretty woolly defence tbh

havent read the piece whatre the objections

Marie Le Conte had the point earlier that there's definitely a case to be made for Patreon, but if you're using it to free yourself from the clutches of copy editors and fact checkers, maybe don't.

On one level I feel almost bad for her because she’s not the first British person with a catastrophically bad take.

On the other, the kind of inaccurate shite she’s peddling isn’t any less patronising coming from someone who’s supposedly on the side of the progressives.

And as Naoise Dolan so cuttingly put it:
https://twitter.com/naoisedolan/status/10016084485539676

It would be nice if British media didn’t feel the need to explain stuff through the voices of people not familiar with the country. Someone else in the thread pointed out that even emigrants had to tread lightly which I thought was interesting and accurate - I can comment on the culture but I don’t live there anymore and the country feels different every time I go back!

I feel it is slightly rich to expect Ireland to be this familiar with the Work of someone who was not herself familiar with the difference between Taoiseach and Dáil. https://t.co/kYU3Vxay6W

— thot experiment (@NaoiseDolan) May 29, 2018

What is her Irish background anyway?

big father ted fan iirc

'Laurie Penny becoming the story' is something that's only happened because dozens of people have a weird obsession with her

FWIW this happens to most female journalists especially young, left-wing feminist writers. LP's just especially blunder-prone, even though her heart's in the right place. To be fair this irritates me a lot less now that she's no longer the automatic go-to voice for lazy commissioning editors.

LP's writing is 1/3 "yeah, this is my view, good article" 1/3 "this is my view but I'm uncomfortable with you in my corner because this isn't the best take on it" and 1/3 "oh god no wtf" for me

condolences to the people of ireland on this one falling in that latter 2/3rds I guess

I did enjoy this post, clearly written by someone seething in about five minutes, that addresses how bad general British coverage of Ireland is.

https://www.joe.ie/amp/politics/10-rules-british-journalists-covering-irish-627662

Doing a good job conflating British with English there though that's what we expect from the Irish.

It does never cease to amaze me how little English people know about Ireland. Its right there! I always get asked if I'm from "southern Ireland." I had never heard this expression before I lived here! At first I was confused. I'm from the west! I know this seems petty, but in the aftermath of the EU referendum I went around lecturing people about the effect on the good friday agreement, until I realised that I was telling most people about the existence of the good friday agreement.

"and which part had the war?"

xxxp MLC actually mentioned commissioning editors in her list of things that Patreon deprives us of, but that's a good thing, I reckon. For perspective, I'm sure that we can all agree that anything that happened with Laurie is nothing compared with the fact that John Waters, the Raffles of oxygen, has been getting regular work all the way through this.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/05/ireland-an-obituary

the Raffles of oxygen

vg

most english ppl don't know much abt england either

there's a really distinctive lack of curiosity its true. I also recently explained to somebody (from brighton) where east anglia is.

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi.dailymail.co.uk%2Fi%2Fpix%2F2009%2F03%2F03%2Farticle-1154159-067F4A5C0000044D-724_233x356.jpg&f=1

people whose mind is blown by the existence of "Dún Laoghaire" and think it's some sort of niche reference that only Ireland experts will get

passed and off to himself for signing

I saw this and haven’t really followed, are they still planning to charge €300 for the procedure?

Twitter moments categorised Savita’s death as “Indian woman who died in Ireland” and it made my eye twitch, so here are my favourite pictures of the Savita mural back in May:

The scene at Savita’s mural in Dublin’s Portobello as polls closed in Ireland’s abortion referendum pic.twitter.com/VAbVPSpCgi

— Rita O'Reilly (@RitaOReilly) May 25, 2018

The Savita mural in Dublin right now @rtenews pic.twitter.com/cbE2z9nnHl

— Samantha Libreri (@SamanthaLibreri) May 26, 2018

Flowers and messages left at a mural for Savita Halappanavar, who died in 2012 after she was refused an abortion pic.twitter.com/eXGqN7vOoq

— Eleanor Barlow (@EleanorBarlow) May 26, 2018

Flowers and tributes were left at the Dublin mural of Savita Halappanavar, who died in 2012 in an Irish hospital after she was denied an abortion while suffering the complications of a septic miscarriage. “I’m so sorry. My vote was for you,” one note reads. #8thRef pic.twitter.com/b5DRnfZFs9

— Sinéad Baker (@sineadbaker1) May 26, 2018

</3

idk gyac about the charges but id imagine not, possibly that was a reporting of some of the amendments that the religious td/senator crowd were tryinf to have implemented while it went through oireachtas

stress im not sure on that tho

I guess we can crowd fund a um, fund for people who need abortions?