with Stephen Meyler

#RepealThe8th

#TuringsLaws

#RPDR

REPEAL APPEAL

A friend tells me she has been going out at night with her garden loppers to cut down the referendum posters now clinging to every lamppost in her neighbourhood. She believes in the right of the people who put them there to publicise their views; it’s just that every single one of the posters is urging a No vote. Where are the Yes posters, she asks? Aren’t we supposed to hear both sides of the argument equally?

There are lots of paranoid-sounding stories circulating about how the anti-repeal side are being lavishly funded by right-wing US Christian groups, often deviously via sudden steep increases in private donations to non-Church religious organisations here.

Whatever the truth, the anecdotal evidence of day-to-day travel around the city suggests that there are far more No posters. The N11 from Foxrock through Donnybrook was No all the way last Saturday, for example. What’s more, whoever is putting up these posters seems untroubled by trivialities like facts – how did they distort statistics (let alone language) to come up with ‘1 in 5 babies in England are aborted’, for instance?