Greetings from Ireland! I hope you're all keeping well. We're doing a grand old job here looking after ourselves thank you very much. There have been protestors outside Government Buildings for the last fortnight calling for the repeal of the eighth amendment. Not that we have a government, but I'm sure that will sort itself out. And up the North aren't mad things always happening? This week they gave a woman a three-month suspended sentence for getting drugs that would induce a miscarriage. Today, the trial of a mother who tried to get similar pills for her daughter was adjourned in Belfast.
Greetings from Ireland, where as the popular UK website The Pool put it, “when a country bans abortion, it creates horror stories.” We’re used to horror stories in Ireland. We’re good at them. The dead girl in a grotto. The dead baby on a beach. The dead babies in mass unmarked graves. The women imprisoned. The crying girls in airports and ferry terminals. The braindead woman kept alive because a constitution owns her womb. The deathly, sinister, painful silence. Greetings from Ireland. Help.
I laughed hearing an American reporter on Morning Ireland the other day talking about the controversy Donald Trump caused when he merely suggested women should be punished for having abortions. How ridiculous it sounded, the Irish national broadcaster reporting on that incident, when there's an alarm bell that goes off in RTE anytime someone Irish mentions abortion - not the Angelus by the way, a little more hysterical than that. "Balance!" it shrieks! "Balance!" Just as broadcasters made fools of themselves clambering for anti-gay-rights opinions in the lead up to the marriage referendum, they continue to see voices that are pro-choice as things that need to be not listened to but opposed.
What “balance” is really about is censorship. Women get balanced. Gays get balanced. If only they’d stop talking about their rights. If only we could keep our fingers in our ears without hearing these horror stories. Balance. Help.
It doesn’t matter how vigorously the UN or Amnesty or the EU or whoever else shake their heads and wag their fingers in our direction when it comes to the human rights violations regarding women’s reproductive rights in Ireland. The Irish media isn’t so hot on debate or conversation or trying to solve this issue, it’s “balancing” that is the priority. We’re grand, thanks a million. This is Ireland and we can sort out our own messes, Irish solutions to Irish problems. They always work, don’t? The outsiders just don’t understand us. We’re a complex country. Nothing makes sense. Ha! It’s gas really.
But now, abortion and balance and the media collide and collide over and over again, and we can’t see the wood for the trees. For decades, the Irish media has largely collaborated in the silencing of women and ignoring the scandal of denying us medical care. That silence is breaking, but only barely. Where are the media campaigns to end the oppression of Irish women? Where are the hard-hitting documentaries and investigative reports? Where is RTE only swinging in the breeze of the hot air the coordinated complaints of anti-choice activists blow when the abortion alarm sounds?
What Irish women North and South can hope for now is external pressure. The British media balked at the story this week that a woman is a criminal because she got pills to end her pregnancy. Pills that are common elsewhere. Too poor to travel, this was her only way to access the medical care her home denied. There is a growing chorus of British journalists and news outlets and especially female columnists condemning our brutal, criminalising, archaic and oppressive laws.
In the centenary of the 1916 Rising, let's hope Britain can save us, eh? Maybe something bigger will happen, an even greater horror story, something really major that external media will use to embarrassed into action. Denying women bodily autonomy here ends up on England's doorstep. If we can't address it, maybe they will? Help. Greetings from Ireland and thank God for England. Sure where would we be without them? I suppose we'd have to arrest at lot more women. That would be terribly inconvenient, and then even more international media would be mean to us.
Greetings from Ireland, where young women who desperately don’t want to be pregnant are informed upon, and the police come for them, vulnerable and afraid, and they are stood up in front of judges who criminalise them with ancient legislation, and when we talk about it, the media decides it can’t be spoken about alone but pitched against the very rhetoric that got us here and keeps us here. But don’t worry, it’s only women. And what are they going to do? Arrest us all? Help.