Wait No More: Ireland’s abortion laws and the bands fighting to change them

The anger, despair and hunger for change that flows through the streets of Dublin is being punctuated by jagged guitar riffs

Dean Van Nguyen
Monday 24 October 2016 11:00 BST
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Julie Hawk from the band HAWK
Julie Hawk from the band HAWK

In Ireland, you’re not supposed to talk about abortion. The country with some of the most restrictive reproduction health laws in Europe has long hidden the issue under a dark, unchallengeable cloak. The number of women and girls who have travelled to access abortion services in other countries over the past two decades is in the six figures. But you’re not supposed to talk about that.

Abortion was a wicked taboo instilled by centuries of strong-arm Catholic influence. Forbidden back-garden gossip not meant for public airing. An inconvenient truth quietly exported to Great Britain, because that’s just how it was. But a grassroots movement to overthrow this oppressive strain of Irish society has greatly intensified in recent years. Last month, an estimated 30,000 people paraded through the streets of Dublin for the Abortion Rights Campaign’s March for Choice. Women, long silenced by the shackles of the Irish patriarchy, are voicing their fears and personal experiences in greater numbers.

The anger, despair and hunger for change that flowed through the streets of the Irish capital that day is being punctuated by jagged guitar riffs. Irish rock bands, brimming with punk angst and feminist ideals, are making music inspired by, and inspiring, the pro-choice movement. In the tradition of the protest song – and the belief that a three-minute track can change the world – this is music that distills the demands for abortion rights, recasts it in its most visceral form, and lights the fuse.

“Conversation, if that’s the first thing you achieve with making music like that, then you’re already doing something really useful,” says Julie Hawk, a native Dubliner who fronts the half-Irish, half-British rock band HAWK. “Especially when you think of the tradition in Ireland going back, just being silent and shamed to the point where you can’t even talk about topics. If you can provoke discussion then that’s the first thing that I would be proud of.”

HAWK were inspired to write about Ireland’s abortion laws when they realised how little awareness there was about the issue in the UK. Their single “Once Told” hammers you from oblique angles. Julie descries Ireland’s embarrassment as she tries to enter the mindset of women in Ireland unable to access abortion clinics because they don’t have the money, passport or support. “What’s new? Smothering it in shame?” she sings.

“There’s all these little double standards. The more that I thought about it, I was finding more and more of them, to the point it was just suffocating. The whole situation is horrendously convoluted when you think of all the variables,” she says. “I think if you try to tap into enough perspectives, you can reach more people, and paint enough of a picture that people start to talk about it.”

“We’ve always strived to create powerful music, one way or another,” adds guitarist Matthew Harris. “The louder we’ve got, the more anthemic you could describe that music as and it’s felt like a natural progression. I don’t know if you [Julie Hawk] remember, but my reaction was, ‘Fucking damn right, it’s about time we did something like that’.”

September Girls

The band meet me in The Mercantile, the kind of Dublin pub you could put on a postcard and sell to tourists who lap up the legend of Ireland. Beneath the myth is a country that only legalised divorce in 1996, a country where the Magdalene Laundries – cruel Catholic Church-run institutions that practically imprisoned women deemed “fallen”– were allowed to exist until that same year.

September Girls emerged as fuzzy dream pop band that pulled Spector pop, gothic rock and 1950s noir movies into a reverb chamber. Evolving into a harder rocking outfit on latest album Age of Indignation, the more muscular orchestration underpins songs that address modern-day Ireland and the church’s role in it. “Catholic Guilt”, in particular, deals with anger from the viewpoint of being a woman. In its impressive 360 video, the band are bound and muzzled. Words are scrawled on their bodies – vessel, subject, fear, control and guilt. They’re messages September Girls see as being forced upon Irish women on a daily basis.

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“As a woman, you sometimes feel that your body is not your own and that it is something anyone can comment upon or judge – a vessel or weapon that you're unable to control yourself,” the band’s Paula Cullen tells me in an email. “The response to the track was largely positive, although a couple of YouTube users found it necessary to post prayers under the video.”

The Republic of Ireland’s abortion laws are enshrined in the constitution. The eighth amendment guarantees the embryo or foetus equal right to life of the mother, effectively making abortion in all circumstances illegal except in situations where to continue a pregnancy would result in death. Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the UK, also has harsh restrictions in place.

In Temple Bar, a tourist trap in the centre of Dublin, a mural designed by Irish street artist Maser appeared over the summer featuring a love heart bearing the words “Repeal the 8th”. It was controversially removed due to complaints and a planning violation, but the design has lived in on in replica murals and t-shirts. It’s also become normal to see sweatshirts sold by Project Repeal – a stark, minimalist design with “Repeal” emblazoned across the chest – on pedestrians. Project Repeal last month released the powerful short film We Face This Land, which featured a variety of Irish women, a spoken word piece by novelist Sarah Maria Griffin and music by electronic artist MMOTHS. The video’s online traction underlines the role the arts can play in social movements.

It was around the time the Temple Bar mural was being removed that four-piece group Mongoose were plotting a video for their track “Doing Things Wrong”. Depicting the harrowing journey Irish women take every day to avail of abortion services in England, the clip sees the four women walking through a mysterious forest where they’re forced to give up their identities by handing over their passports and dress in anonymous black. Finally, they lose their voice by being gagged.

“We were thinking of what to base the video on and we hit on the idea of Repeal the 8th because it felt like it totally suited the mood of the song – the whole urgency, the frustration and the confusion,” says Cara Dunne. “The song came together really quickly and we recorded it quickly and we needed to get it out there. We felt the same about repealing the 8th. Now is the time to get the idea out there.”

 Sissy

If some bands attack the reproductive rights issue from more skewered angles, punk rock trio Sissy crowbarred it wide open on “Sail and Rail”. The song revolves around going to England to get an abortion with Celtic music legend Enya, pinching the melody from her song ‘Orinoco Flow’, its name a nod at the mode of transport as many as 11 Irish women take every day to access British services. “Stick your dick in me so I can go on holidays/ Two obstetricians and a GP won’t tell me I’m not going on holidays,” the band sneer.

“Ireland never got the Enlightenment, but we’re due one any day now,” says bassist Michelle Doyle. “‘Sail and Rail’ is critique of pro-life rhetoric in Ireland, of which there is no escape from. If you criticise it, you are a salacious millennial and what do you know anyway? We wanted to lampoon the ridiculousness of their claims and also pay homage to Enya.”

Lisa Hannigan, Gemma Hayes, Sinéad O’Connor and The Rubberbandits have backed the Artists' Campaign To Repeal the 8th. Meanwhile, recent events in Poland have been applauded by campaign organisers. It now serves as Exhibit A of the power of reproduction rights protest. The goal is clear: secure a referendum that allows the Irish people to vote on repealing the 8th ammendment.

“As far as we are concerned, calling a referendum is simply a question of the government implementing their role in our democracy,” says September Girls’ Cullen. “There is no excuse for the situation to continue without direction from the electorate.”

“I support the Repeal the 8th campaign and I also think that it’s not enough,” adds Doyle. “It’s not enough to simply take out a paragraph in the constitution. We need to insert that abortion has to be free, safe and legal. That is the absolute end goal and we can’t let our support be conditional or wavering.”

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