Thousands of people marched in Dublin on Saturday to demand that the next Irish government allow for a referendum legalising abortion in the republic. The demonstrators want a national vote on whether or not to repeal the 8th amendment to Ireland’s constitution, which effectively makes the fetus even at early gestation an Irish citizen.

The Abortion Rights Alliance said the march through the Irish capital would be the last before the general election and those who took part wanted all the republic’s political parties to offer a referendum once the next government was formed.

Claire Brophy, a spokeswoman for the Abortion Rights Campaign, said the latest opinion polls “indicated a strong appetite to liberalise our abortion laws”. She added: “Political parties can’t hold off on a referendum for fear that a conversation needs to happen beforehand. It will happen when people know a referendum is coming, as happened with marriage equality.”

The Irish Labour party, the junior partner in government with Fine Gael, has offered its support for a new referendum to repeal the 8th amendment. But a Labour minister in the coalition warned ahead of Saturday’s March for Choice that it could take a decade before the Irish people are ready to dump the amendment and liberalise Ireland’s abortion laws.

Minister of state Aodhán Ó Ríordáin said he believed a referendum on abortion would not be carried by the electorate at this stage. “If it happened in the morning, it would be lost, and it would be trounced and it would be 20 years before we can return to it,” he told RTE radio. “But it’ll happen, I would imagine, quite late towards the end of the [next] government, because we’re nowhere near winning it.”

Pro-choice groups in the republic say the 8th amendment creates a legal “chill factor” among medical teams even in cases affected by a law passed last year that allows for terminations in very limited circumstances. The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act (2013) allows abortion when continuing with a pregnancy would result in the mother’s death or in cases where the woman is suicidal. Despite this legislation, women who are victims of rape and in many cases suicidal are still refused abortions in Irish hospitals.

Last year, a young asylum seeker who had been raped in her native country was refused an abortion by the Irish health service even though she claimed she was suicidal. The woman tried to escape to Britain to get a termination in Liverpool, but was arrested and deported back to Ireland from the ferry terminal by Merseyside police because she had no personal documentation with her.



The woman was forced to go ahead with the pregnancy and gave birth via caesarean section in Ireland. The child was given up for adoption. It is understood the woman’s legal team are to sue the Irish state for forcing her to go to full term against her will.