Fear of foreign influence as Irish abortion vote nears
AS IRELAND prepares to vote in May on a referendum on whether to repeal its ban on abortion, anti-abortion campaigners can be seen rallying most weekdays on the streets of Dublin, outside Parliament, and at universities, news media buildings and the offices of human rights groups.
They arrive wearing body cameras and bearing placards with graphic images of aborted fetuses.
But not all of them are Irish. Of the eight members of the anti-abortion Irish Center for Bio-Ethical Reform who protested outside the offices of the Irish Times on a recent weekday, only three – including the group’s leader, Jean Engela – are Irish. The others include Americans and a Hungarian.
“We try to be as multinational as the abortion industry, and they make no apologies for sending in their international affiliates to pontificate to the Irish people,” Engela said.
The protests – relatively small but highly visible here in the Irish capital – are an emblem of the strong emotions as the country prepares to vote in late May on whether to retain the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, which bans abortion in nearly all circumstances and was itself enacted by a referendum, in 1983. (Abortion was illegal before 1983, but the amendment made it even harder to terminate a pregnancy, even to save a mother’s life.)
To the age-old debates around abortion – including questions of when life begins and of women’s control over their reproductive rights – the referendum has added a new dimension of concern about potential outside interference in the vote.
An ethics regulator recently ordered two abortion-rights groups, Amnesty International Ireland and the Abortion Rights Campaign, to return grants of $150,000 and $25,000 to George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. It said the money was a foreign political donation intended to affect the outcome of a referendum, and therefore banned.
But so far, it does not appear any antiabortion groups have been asked to return overseas donations, despite reports money is being openly raised on their behalf, particularly in the US.
One US group, the Pro-Life Action League, told an Irish newspaper in 2012 that anti-abortion groups were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Irish anti-abortion groups like Youth Defence, which has been linked to far-right movements in Europe.
Youth Defence did not respond to a request for comment. The Pro-Life Action League’s executive director, Eric Scheidler, said the remarks concerned US support for the Irish anti-abortion movement over several decades, and said his group had not raised money for the current campaign.
The Irish Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, which picketed the Irish Times, receives foreign funding but claims to be exempt from government oversight. “We are an educational body,” Engela said. He denied that the protest had anything to do with the coming vote, and asserted that some of the volunteers were full-time activists with their own sources of funding.
Some argue that anti-abortion groups are not being held to the same standard as abortion-rights groups.
Theresa Reidy, a political scientist at IrishTimes University College Cork, said there was a long history of overseas interests taking sides in Irish referendums, particularly on issues such as the European Union. Over the last decade, even as support for the abortion ban has waned, concerns about possible outside interference have risen, she said.
Siobhan Mullally, of the Irish Center for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, said the problem of undeclared foreign funding went beyond the abortion debate, and was “also a question about how charities are funded in general”.
The Roman Catholic Church, long a major power in Ireland, was the main driver in the 1983 referendum. The church also opposed, successfully, a referendum in 1986 that would have legalised divorce. In the decades since, however, its social and moral authority has been weakened by scandals, most notably clerical child sex abuse.
The church could not prevent the legalisation of contraception and was on the losing side in referendums that legalised divorce in 1995 and same-sex marriage in 2015. As a result, today’s anti-abortion activists are less overtly religious in their arguments. Instead, they are turning to arguments that abortion harms women’s health. They are also turning to social media tools.
After recent revelations about the misuse of Facebook data to sway Britain’s referendum on European Union membership in 2016, and the US presidential election later that year, fears are growing similar tactics might be used in the referendum campaign.
The Save the 8th Campaign, an antiabortion group, has hired Kanto Systems, a London-based political consultancy, to help run its campaign.
Kanto Systems’ founder, Thomas Bor- wick, was chief technology officer for the Vote Leave campaign in Britain, and developed a canvassing app for Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining organisation that exploited Facebook data on behalf of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
Borwick said he himself had not worked for the Trump campaign, and referred a reporter to a statement from Save the 8th, which said Kanto would be performing “some data analytics for us” but would not be engaged in “any voter profiling or voter targeting.”
John McGuirk, a spokesman for Save the 8th, said in the Irish electoral system, which does not have online voter rolls, individually targeted advertising of the sort practiced by Cambridge Analytica would not be possible. “In terms of targeting advertising at individual voters, we couldn’t do that even if we wanted to, which we don’t,” he said.
The Times of London reported that the Pro Life Campaign, Ireland’s largest umbrella anti-abortion group, has retained uCampaign, a Washington firm that has developed apps for the Trump campaign, the National Rifle Association, the Republican National Committee and Vote Leave.
The Transparent Referendum Initiative, a small group of Irish technology advocates, said it had already detected paid social media campaigns stealthily targeting Irish voters. This month, the group introduced a crowdsourced monitoring tool to detect and investigate anonymous or vaguely sourced paid advertising on Facebook. It has identified 92 such ads relating to the Irish referendum, 55 with anti-abortion messages and 37 in support of abortion rights.