Last week of campaign

'No' sign on Ben Bulbe. RTE.IE 

Next Friday Irish people will vote YES or NO in the abortion referendum. According to the last polls, the Repeal side is going to win, but there's now lots of undecided voters that can change the result.

These days the campaign is taking place in the media and also in the streets of Ireland. In some places like in the capital city the result is nearly clear.

"Like the rest of Dublin, the NO side will always be playing against the wind here” said one NO
campaigner in an Irish Times report this week. Also the big lobbies or pressure groups are
dealing with the people's vote. The most important of those is the catholic church. “Christians must
be pro-life when it comes to the unborn and those who are vulnerable at the end of their lives, the
Eighth Amendment would be a point of no return. Proposed future legislation would permit abortion
without restriction up to 12 weeks, but also permit abortion on physical and mental health grounds up
to six months” Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.

These words are very important in this country, where the catholic culture is inside the population.
“Our intellectual struggles are understandable wanting to vote YES but struggling with the moral
dilemma that feels like a part of our bones, our Catholic skeleton” write Alison O’Connor in an
Irish Examiner opinion article.

The debate continues until Friday but, some analyst highlight: "Abortion is already in Ireland", with
the illegal pills or with the flights towards U.K. Noel Whelan wrote last Friday in the Irish Times about a
story heard in the public radio station last month. A woman called Ciara call to tell that “After a fatal
foetal diagnosis, she and her husband had to travel to Liverpool for an early delivery. A week later
they took the remains of their baby home by ferry. Among the saddest moments of that 10-hour
journey, she said, was when they came to customs at Dublin port. A guard there looked in, saw the
small coffin and rather than raise any issue about appropriate documentation or otherwise, he just
waved them on as if he had seen it a hundred times”.