Breaking the silence on abortion:the 1983 referendum campaign

An anti-abortion rally outside the GPO in the early 1980s. (Derek Spiers)
An anti-abortion rally outside the GPO in the early 1980s. (Derek Spiers)

The passing of the 1967 Abortion Act that legalised abortion in the United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland) was a source of controversy in the Irish Republic, where access to contraception was illegal. After 1967, increasing numbers of Irish women availed of access to abortion services in Britain while the debate about women’s right to control their own fertility carried on against a background of difficult legal cases. In 1981 the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC) secured pre-election promises from both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to amend the constitution to ensure that abortion could not be introduced either by legislation or by the courts. Many Catholic bishops and priests spoke out in favour of the amendment, but all the other mainstream churches opposed it. Fianna Fáil backed the proposal, Fine Gael was divided, and Labour and the Workers’ Party and liberal forces generally opposed it, although all stressed that they were not advocating the legalisation of abortion.

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Claims of ‘foreign funding’ of anti-amendment campaign

There were claims by some pro-amendment activists that the anti-amendment campaigners were being funded by foreign forces determined to undermine Ireland’s status as the protector of traditional Christian values. Far from this being the case, Andrew remembered how tight the budgets were and the lack of resources available to the activists:

Most vicious and refractory girls’the reformatories at Ballinasloe and Monaghan

‘Ulster Reformatory School for Catholic Girls, Monaghan’—originally Spark’s Lake brewery, purchased for the St Louis nuns by Charles Bianconi. (St Louis convent archive, Monaghan)
‘Ulster Reformatory School for Catholic Girls, Monaghan’—originally Spark’s Lake brewery, purchased for the St Louis nuns by Charles Bianconi. (St Louis convent archive, Monaghan)

On 2 July 1883, fifteen-year-old Bridget Carroll arrived at the Spark’s Lake reformatory in Monaghan to serve the remainder of a sentence that had been imposed on her four years earlier. She had been tried at Loughrea petty sessions in September 1879 on a charge that she ‘Did threaten to stab Anne Flynn’. She was found guilty and sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, followed by five years in a reformatory in Ballinasloe. This reformatory, which had been her home for nearly four years, was now closing, and she had made the long journey to Monaghan to serve out her sentence under the supervision of the St Louis sisters.

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