ACTIVISM BEGAN IN TCD OVER ABORTION RIGHTS
IVANA Bacik shot to prominence in the late 1980s as a leading campaigner for abortion rights. At the time, even publishing information about abortion clinics in the UK was highly controversial.
Bacik and the students’ union in Trinity College published names and addresses, and as a result the highly influential anti-abortion Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) brought them to court, threatening prison.
Back in 1989 on the fateful day of SPUC’s legal case against Ivana and her students’ union colleagues, I saw her outside the Four Courts, grinning at a prochoice rally on the quays. I remark how calm she appeared for a 21year-old, facing the prospect of having the doors of a prison cell slam in her face.
‘I was just putting a brave face on it. Mary Robinson was my lecturer and our legal adviser, and she told us to pack our toothbrushes for prison. It was an intense time because SPUC went after us so viciously.
‘A woman who had just been released from Mountjoy warned us in pretty graphic terms about what to expect in prison. This was before the Dóchas Centre was built and women were kept in the basement in primitive conditions. I’ll never forget it but we were very well supported really in Trinity.’
She has the newspaper clippings from that torrid time. The idea of their mother as a student activist amuses her daughters greatly, while her mother has a framed photograph of her iconoclastic daughter under the portico of the Four Courts.