Home to Vote in the 8th amendment referendum!

As I mentioned I took a recent trip to Key West at very short notice. I planned to go for  8 or 9 days but given that the most important (in my lifetime) referendum was taking place on 25th of May, I cut my holiday short and left on Thursday 24th and flew home through the night to land in Dublin at 7am on the day of the vote.

There were two reasons I wanted to come home to vote.
1. I was nervous about the result. If the No side won, I wanted to know that I had done everything in my power to ensure Yes won. I had canvassed for weeks and the final step was to walk in to the polling booth and mark x in the Yes box.
2. If the Yes won, I wanted to celebrate knowing that I was on the right side of history and by god I wanted the memory of casting my Yes vote.

Here I am setting off from Key West. Yes, I wore flip flops and denim cut offs on the plane to Charlotte - along with my repeal jumper of course!

 

When I landed in Dublin I went to sleep for a few hours (even though I had slept over 6 hours on the plane) and then got up to go vote. It was a lovely sunny day and I put on a skirt, top and sandals to go vote. It was an outfit I wouldn't regularly wear but I felt like dressing like a woman as I voted for women's health rights.
After I voted I pinned my Yes buttons on and we went to Smyth's beer garden for a cold drink. I gave one of my Yes buttons to a friendly lady sitting beside us who admired them when we came in.

At 5pm, my twin sister left work and stopped off at one of the main train stations to make a final push at convincing people to get down to their polling place and vote Yes! As she distributed leaflets she began to get the feeling we were going to win. She got lots of thumbs up or people saying that they had voted yes already.

And then just after 10pm when the polls closed, the results of the exit poll came through. It was a landslide Yes!

What a relief.

Once the 8th is removed from the constitution (which should happen in the Autumn) legislation will be enacted that will allow women to gain bodily autonomy and when they visit their doctor they will close the door and make medical decisions for themselves without outside involvement.

My Yes vote was for Miss P and her family. On a canvas in Dublin City, I stood on a doorstep and told a lady about this case, and as I explained how it was the 8th amendment that meant this lady was treated in this way, I began to see a change in her stance.  It was cases like these that Irish people couldn't stand by and do nothing about, they no longer wanted to see things like this happen. From 2018 the Irish people have compassionately voted that this will never happen again.

The next day Amy, Cousin Kasey and I all watched the count. With lots of Dublin constituencies voting over 70% and the final result coming out with a 64% Yes it was exciting to watch but in someways anticlimactic after all it was just the right way to vote.