Aine Kelly knows her home town. “The young leave,” she said. “The old stay.” As the 29-year-old campaigner with a stack of pamphlets walked through a housing development, knocking on doors, the locals revealed themselves: They were retirees who favored garden trolls, statues of the Virgin Mary and wee, excitable dogs.
“Hello, sir!” Kelly said to an elderly gentleman who kept a wheelbarrow filled with peat for his fireplace. “We’re here to talk to you about the referendum and what you might be thinking.”
For the next seven minutes, Kelly and the man in a gray sweater engaged in a remarkable conversation, a civil, skeptical, charged, raw and very personal debate, about what the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar this week called “a once in a generation decision.”
The Irish will vote Friday on whether to scrap the Eighth Amendment to their constitution, passed in 1983, which gives “the unborn” and the mother “the equal right to life” and outlaws almost all abortions — even in cases of rape, incest, fatal fetal abnormality and risk to maternal health.
Ireland, for centuries guided and dominated by the Catholic Church, its culture and its priests, has one of the strictest abortion bans in the developed world. Seeking or providing an abortion is punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Since 2013, there has been an exception for when a mother’s life is at risk.
If the repeal wins, Ireland’s political leadership has promised that Parliament would quickly pass a new law guaranteeing unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks, and beyond that in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities or serious risks to a mother’s health. That’s in line, more or less, with the other 27 members of European Union.
It’s in the rural heart of Ireland where there is greatest resistance.
Castlerea is located in Roscommon, the only county to vote against, by a slim margin, Ireland’s 2015 referendum that approved same-sex marriage by a countrywide landslide, 62 percent to 38 percent.
The elderly man at the door said to Kelly, “I was your way once.” Meaning he supported abortion rights. “I worked the ferries. I saw the girls coming and going. It broke your heart.”
Between 1980 and 2016, at least 170,000 Irish women traveled to Britain for abortions. Today, they more typically make the journey via discount airline. And thousands more each year — an accurate count is impossible because the practice is both hidden and illegal — perform do-it-yourself abortions at home, without medical supervision, with pills they buy on the Internet and smuggle into Ireland.
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