COLUMN: The people of Ireland paid their best possible tribute to Savita

Published: Wed 30 May 2018, 5:09 PM

Last updated: Wed 30 May 2018, 6:22 PM

IT ENDED not with a whisper, but with a roar, so loud it was heard the world over.
Everyone involved in the Yes campaign hoped their work would carry the campaign over the line. Everyone had suspected there was a solid public appetite for change; everyone feared that the votes of quieter, conservative rural Ireland might outweigh the live-and-let-live attitudes of city dwellers. Everyone hoped, hoped, hoped they had done enough to win. It didn’t have to be a landslide; a bare-bones majority would suffice. But nobody expected it to work out like this. Nobody expected a vote so visceral, so energised, so determined, so heartfelt.

The Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution had not just been rescinded; it had been torn to shreds – and with it, any last belief that Ireland is a fundamentally conservative country.
Volunteers and campaigners who had shown up to the vast exhibition halls of the RDS’ Simmonscourt Hall did not expect to be in a position like this. They’d been knocking on doors in the capital and were confident in solid support. Their fear was that the No vote, inevitably, would catch up in other areas. Having expected the morning to be ravaged with tension, the campaigners were simply stunned into disbelieving silence. And so they moved; hundreds of volunteers in green hi-viz jackets for Together4Yes ready to watch the votes being counted, so they could vouch for themselves. A smaller crowd of opponents, in rival pink hi-viz LoveBoth jackets, stood beside them tallying votes, with duty but without hope. Their main spokesperson, Cora Sherlock, stayed for an hour but cited media commitments and left quietly.

The tally sheets were delivered to a team at the back of the hall, to be assimilated and aggregated. Over the heads of that team, stuck to that wall, was the picture of the woman who, perhaps more than any other, had brought Ireland to this point, Savita.
Her story changed everything; an anonymous 31-year-old Galway dentist whose image was imprinted in the back of the national mind. A woman whose tragic story proved that the Eighth Amendment didn’t just affect crisis or unwanted pregnancies, but also planned pregnancies that were healthy until they weren’t. Yes, her formal cause of death was the mismanagement of sepsis, but the chance of catching an infection in the first place would have been far lower had she not been left in a hospital bed for two days waiting for a miscarriage to run its course. That sepsis meant Savita died, four days after the daughter she so desperately wanted.

She wasn’t the only hard case, of course. We’d had the case of Amanda Mellet, who couldn’t end an unviable pregnancy in Ireland, who couldn’t afford to stay the night in Liverpool, who wasn’t given counselling in her home country, who unexpectedly received her child’s ashes by courier. We had ‘P’, a brain-dead woman with her skull open and brain exposed, wearing makeup so as not to upset her visiting children, kept alive because doctors didn’t know if they could withdraw life support while she was also 15 weeks pregnant.
We had ‘C’, a cancer patient who suffered a botched abortion in the UK after being unsure if further cancer treatment could harm her baby. We had an earlier ‘C’, a teenage rape victim brought to England for an abortion by the State without the knowledge she would lose her child – another victim without a choice. And, starting it all, we had ‘X’, a girl of 14 lumbered with her rapist’s child and stopped by the State from travelling to England. Perhaps many, placing an X in the box marked ‘Tá’, had thought of the girl with the same name. Perhaps that girl, who would now be a woman of 40, was one of them.

- In Meath West 64 per cent of voters gave a resounding yes to repeal the Eighth Amendment. A total of 41,319 out of the electorate of 65,651 - representing a 62.75 per cent turnout took to the polling booths in the constituency on Friday to have their say in the abortion referendum.

- The Yes vote was returned by 26,343 (63.9 per cent) people while the no camp amounted to 14,850.

- In Meath East 69.2 per cent of the electorate voted yes with 30.8 per cent on the no side of the argument.

But Savita’s case hit home more than most. Unlike the alphabet soup of other cases, we knew her name. And unlike many of the other cases, we knew her time and place of death. It was perhaps little surprise that RTÉ’s exit poll said, despite the months of rigorous campaigning, three-quarters of voters had made their minds up five years ago or more.
Among those watching the count was Shampa Lahiri, who felt the tragedy of Savita more personally than most. Australian born to Indian parents and married to a Dubliner, Lahiri had become an Irish citizen and cast her first vote in favour of Repeal – then came to watch the count, dressed in her Indian finest, with full sari and a Bindi on her forehead.
“Every migrant comes here in search of better lives,” she tells me, confidently but tearfully. “We come here to work hard, and to have better access to opportunities than in the country of origin that we come from. We don't come here expecting to die in a public hospital, under the care of trained professionals. Regardless of which side of the debate were you on this referendum, everybody has to recognise that what happened to Savita Halappanvar should never have happened.”

Shortly afterward came Dr Peter Boylan. A hate figure for some No voters – a man who devoted a lifetime to delivering children, now accused of wanting to kill them – he arrived in the RDS to a hero’s welcome and a media scrum.
There were three other media scrums, the first for Mary Lou McDonald, who freely admitted she didn’t expect such a margin of victory. The second was for an unlikely hero, Simon Harris, who at 25 said he had “grave difficulty” support an abortion law and at 31 had led a referendum to secure one. “Under the Eighth Amendment,” he told us, “the only thing we could say to women [in crisis pregnancy] was take a flight, or take a boat. Now the country is saying no: take our hand.” A journalist behind him quietly cried.

But the biggest scrum, and the most joyful cheer, came for the three co-chairs of Together For Yes: Ailbhe Smyth, Orla O’Connor and Gráinne Griffin. Smyth had been agitating for this change for 35 years, and was overcome. The crowd was so large, and her voice so hoarse, that she could barely be heard, but that seemed unimportant.
With the exit polls proven correct by the tallies, there was little more to do at the RDS and so the journalists slowly headed towards Dublin Castle for the national result. But first, a detour.
A few days before polling, a hoarding on a vacant site in Dublin’s artsy Portobello district had been painted with the face of Savita and a simple word, ‘YES’. It had become an immediate rallying point, where voters had laid flowers in her memory, writing messages on postcards and stuck them to the wall. A few dozen were posted on polling day.
As the result became clear, voters who wanted to celebrate went straight to Dublin Castle; those who wanted to reflect, went to Savita. The few dozen postcards had become a few hundred, all of them with messages of sorrow and sympathy that it had taken this woman’s harrowing death to trigger a movement for change.
One simply said: ‘My Yes was for you.’

In Dublin Castle, an impromptu party had broken out. A small group, Voices for Change, were singing pop classics with the lyrics changed to reflect the referendum (“Don’t stop repealing, hold on to that feeling…”). Another, Angels for Repeal – a group of people literally dressed as angels, not all of them women – were dancing along with abandon.
From 5:30pm the stage emptied as campaign leaders went inside to hear the final result being announced, leaving the crowds outside to make do with hearing it on the loudspeakers. Of the 40 constituencies in Ireland, only one had voted No, and then only by a small margin. 2.15 million votes had been cast, more than any other referendum in Irish history. 1.43 million, 66.4 per cent, were for Yes.
Outside, then, to hear the Taoiseach.
“I believe today will be remembered as the day we embraced our responsibilities as citizens and as a country: the day Ireland stepped out from under the last of our shadows and into the light; the day we came of age as a country; the day we took our place among the nations of the world. Today, we have a modern constitution for a modern people.”

The trip inside to watch the results, and the wasted time spent waiting for the Taoiseach’s setpiece statement, meant those of us tasked with reading the nation’s mood had missed the final celebration. By the time we were back in the courtyard of Dublin Castle, the crowd had begun to dissolve.
Some of that crowd had gone back to Portobello, to Savita’s mural, where few could bring themselves to speak. The pile of flowers was bigger than a few hours ago, while the wall of postcards had grown and grown. Evidently, at one point mid-afternoon, the pile of blank postcards had run out; one person improvised, writing their message on a ‘Votes for Women’ poster left over from the centenary of women’s suffrage.
“Savita, I am so sorry,” it read. “The travesty of your death propelled this country towards change. You should not have died. You are in our hearts, today and always.” It was signed, ‘Mná na hÉireann’.

More postcards had arrived later, and more and more people left their messages, saying sorry to a 31-year-old immigrant they had never met. Their tokens of support, sympathy, solidarity, now covered almost all of the wall and crept to cover Savita’s face. It was almost as if, with Savita’s mission accomplished, there was no further desire to keep her image alive.
The people of Ireland had paid their best possible tribute to Savita Halappanavar: they had allowed her to rest in peace.