It is time to say thank you to Britain. We should have been saying it all along. Thank you for looking after Irish women when the Irish state would not, when Irish doctors could say nothing, offer no help, no advice, not even a phone number. Thank you to the hospital in Liverpool that looked after so many Irish women whose babies suffered fatal foetal abnormalities. Thank you for making them not feel like pariahs because their babies were going to die, but for affording them the proper and compassionate medical treatment that your doctors’ code requires. Thank you for taking all that sorrow and pain and folding it into your hearts without complaint, or racism, and with a complete absence of nationalistic or governmental ire.

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Thanks for not getting insulted when “England” became an Irish code word for “abortion”.

Thanks for not shutting us out. Thanks for putting up with decade upon decade of another country’s problem and not turning this into a political argument or a cause of difficulty – but just getting on with it as the women arrived, 10 or so per day, into your ports and airports with the tight look on their faces that said: “Please help me.” Thanks for doing this quietly and constantly during the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, during the elections and re-elections of Northern Ireland assemblies that failed to legislate for their own women’s needs. Thanks for doing it through rage and hatred, violence and change. Thanks for doing it after the UK joined the European Union and through all the public bitching about Europe that followed, and also when Brexit has made things uncertain between your country and the rest of the world.

Thanks for, maybe, thinking about this issue and then deciding you were just not going there, because there was too much suffering involved.

Thanks to the clinics who took in Irish women born in the 1960s, women who were fleeing not just public shame but also expulsion from their families, homes and jobs: the clinics that took in those women in the 70s and 80s when they were anguished, trapped and dismayed by a pregnancy that would estrange them from their own lives.

Thanks for not making it a social issue, as our social problems eased, for not talking about poverty or illegitimacy, for not focusing on how or why a woman “got herself” here, but focusing simply on the immediate and future risk to her wellbeing. Thanks for being, in practice, steady in your defence of the rights of women to make their own decisions and exercise their right to bodily autonomy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yes campaigners in Dublin call for Northern Ireland to liberalise its abortion laws, the day after the Irish abortion referendum. Photograph: Paul Faith/AFP/Getty Images

And, you know, there were probably a few nurses or doctors who were tired or indifferent. But really, overall, thank you. Thank you for not making Irish women feel more ashamed. Thanks for not making things worse. Thanks for being there for them when they were at their lowest ebb, for not blaming them, or raging at them, or calling them whores, or telling them to offer it up for the Holy Souls. Thanks for not saying they got themselves into this mess, now they may get themselves out of it. Thanks for not throwing them out into the street for daring to ask for an abortion, but for saying: “Yes. We can help.”

Soon you won’t need to do this any more. On Friday, Irish people voted in a referendum to repeal the eighth amendment to the constitution of Ireland. For the first time in the history of the state there is the possibility that abortion will become legal on the sacred soil of Ireland. Because, although abortion was banned within our borders, the right to travel abroad to have an abortion was enshrined in the constitution by a referendum that was held in 1992. This made the prejudice completely clear. Such things could happen, but not at home. Shipping out our problematic and fallen women was part of an attempt to keep our own place pure.

And what did that make you? Perfidious Albion. Perhaps this is one reason why your government never did get involved: the whole issue was so riddled with paradox, doublethink and make-do. We know that these things sometimes have to happen, but for God’s sake, let them happen abroad. Never mind the few who get “caught out” – who cannot, for some reason, make it to the airport because they are too young, or have no passport, or because they are too sick to travel, or too close to death to make it across to you. These hard cases are awful, not because we as a society are awful, but because they have no boarding pass. So thanks for putting up with this also, with our cruelty, our purity, our anguished writhing about.

Thanks for not shouting at us, your closest neighbour, to say that we were in a trap of our own devising, that we should grow up, manage our own problems. Thanks for realising that we did not know how to be Irish, which is to say Catholic, and to do this too. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks for not blaming them, or calling them whores, or telling them to offer it up for the Holy Souls

Some time in the last few decades, the trap began to loosen and let us go. We realised that Irish soil was not sacred, that it was soil like any other. Our lives were ordinary, and were not perfect. Our women were not more lovely than other women, and Britain was not a dumping ground, or an enemy, or a place of foreign and pernicious influence. It was a country almost in charge of itself, as we were almost in charge of our own. It was time to set some fantasy of purity aside, and get real.

There is one corner of the island, however, that remains sacrosanct. Or infantile. Or in denial. Despite the fact that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, abortion is not legal there either. This anomaly now cries out for reform. It is proof, if proof were needed, that a culture is not the same thing as a country, and national borders are only one kind of dividing line. The control of reproduction is a tribal matter. It is often phrased as a question of belief or of religion, but it is also an attempt to control the lives of, and the fertility of, “our own” women and girls.

So thank you for not joining in the nonsense, for not drawing lines or treating us as breeding stock for one tribe or another. The care you afforded Irish women is a sign that our cultures have all kinds of conversations, exchanges and interactions, many of them hidden, complex and benign.

So when you in Britain despair about how people are treated within your borders, when you despair about how migrants are treated when they cross into your lands, remember that you did a hard thing, quietly and for a long time, one that garners little praise. And that hard thing made the lives of Irish women bearable. Just the fact that we knew you were there.

• Anne Enright is an Irish author