70 percent of Youth Defence's Twitter followers come from the U.S. and until recently their donation form was in dollars instead of euros. Nevertheless, the group is Irish and has quite a pedigree in Irish campaigning. Prominent spokespeople and supporters have included ultra-nationalist anti-immigration campaigners as well as anti-IVF, anti-divorce, anti-stem cell research, anti-gay rights and anti-contraception campaigners. They run national road shows, conferences, nationwide billboard campaigns and schools programmes, which they claim will make each new generation of young people "harder to fool than the abortion industry would have expected."

In 1992 Youth Defence's immediate goal was to campaign to ensure that the case of a 14-year-old suicidal rape victim who was not allowed to have an abortion abroad, which brought thousands onto the street in protest, would not lead to any liberalisation of abortion legislation. In 2006 they organised around the "Ms. D" case in which a 17-year-old had to fight a high court battle to be allowed to leave the state to have an abortion abroad. The girl had discovered that her baby was missing a substantial portion of its brain and skull and would be unable to survive outside the womb. Again Youth Defence opposed any legislation that would allow for abortion.

Now, all of this may leave you with the impression that the Irish people are as staunchly anti-abortion as their government. Certainly much of the international coverage in recent weeks following the death of a Savita Halappanavar, a woman who died in an Irish hospital having been refused an abortion, suggested as much. Cut-away shots on one Al Jazeera report gave the impression of Irish cities populated by spooky statues of the Virgin Mary.

The harshness of the Irish state on this issue is actually something of an anachronism in a country whose citizens are abandoning religion more rapidly than almost any other in the world. The Irish people have long been more liberal on abortion than their government. The fact that Youth Defence has been able to impose their will more effectively than the Irish people or the European Court of Human Rights for so long is testament to the power of their enormously well-funded campaigns.

Because of such groups, Ireland is still a place where smear campaigns against government ministers who express even the most limited pro-choice sentiments are commonplace. Much heat was generated on Twitter recently, in a controversy dubbed #listgate, when a pro-life pundit threatened to publish the names of journalists who had expressed pro-choice sentiments on social media following the death of Halappanavaar, thus bringing their objectivity as reporters into question. Youth Defence recently distributed literature to 1.4 million homes and used advertising space in 25 newspapers to attack particular politicians for their role in "opening the door to abortion on demand".