Exit poll: The post referendum thread. No electioneering.

Shurimgreat wrote: »

No. Wearing a condom to prevent a pregnancy you are not prepared for is the responsible thing.

Shurimgreat wrote: »

Yes side no interest in talking about DS cases.

Sad really.

For those who are interested and don't want to be bullied into silence.

manual_man wrote: »

I voted no I'm not part of a religious group. Nor are any of the people I personally know who voted no. The great irony to me, and missed by many but not all, is that many of the worst aspects of past church influence - demonisation, judging, preachiness, self-righteous anger - never really went away at all and have in fact been adopted by many under the guise of progressivism and the strict doctrine which it has come to embody.

I feel a lot of people feel the way I do, but simply feel terrified, especially on college campuses, to speak up in the face of the dominant doctrine of this time. All I can say is do speak up, be true to yourself, for that's really the only path to personal liberation. You may receive a lot of hate for simply expressing opinions that are true to you but that's all the more reason to speak them and you will feel stronger for doing so. And you have a lot more allies than you think. Just because we're not always the loudest and angriest, does not mean we're not here.

The Golden Miller wrote: »

So tell us about your thoughts of the process of pregnancy and the development of the unborn, and how you weighed it up when contrasting the rights of the unborn at various points in it's development against the rights of the mother, and the moral struggles you surely had, to come to your pre-conditioned conclusion?

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

I don't agree that it's a bandwagon, or that it's self-righteousness, or that the celebrations tomorrow will be faux.

Most of us are of a generation which spent the preteen Celtic Tiger years of the 1990s feeling like we were growing up in a modern, progressive, wonderful country to live in. Being taught by our parents about how Ireland won independence from a much more powerful empire, how we have a unique system of democracy (the PR system) which allows each person to meticulously state exactly what they want their government to look like, that after years of recession and corruption, Ireland was now the best economy in Europe and that Irish people had the freedom to do and be anything they wanted. The usual ideology millennials are often bashed for having grown up with, basically.

Then, in the mid-2000s, this entire fantasy of Ireland being such a wonderful place to live was shattered with unbelievable speed and thoroughness. The Ryan and Murphy reports were commissioned and published. A dark, dark history of neglect, abuse, torture, sexual repression and downright evil was suddenly exposed, and for my generation this was the cruelest wake-up call that the free, modern, happy Ireland we had been told about as children was a horrible illusion built to hide the most appalling skeletons in the closet. Suddenly we were ashamed of our country, of the things which had been done in the name of a religion many of us grew up believing was a compassionate one based on love, and which had been done by the democratic, independent republic which our parents had spend our childhoods waxing lyrical about.

We learned of young boys being raped by creepy paedophiles and of our state's institutions doing everything in their power to cover it up. We learned of young women being imprisoned, indefinitely and with no due process, for everything from having a child out of wedlock to being too sexy and extroverted. We learned of defenceless children of both genders being beaten to within an inch of their lives, sometimes tragically beyond the last inch of their lives, by sadistic adults who acted with total impunity and who to this day have never seen the inside of a prison cell for the unimaginable evil they administered for their own perverted gratification. We learned of a society in which it was illegal to express one's own sexuality if it didn't conform to what the establishment had decided was the only acceptable one, and in which it was illegal for people to use devices designed to allow them to enjoy sex without the burden of becoming parents - sometimes, becoming parents for the fifth or sixth time.

Most of us were still reeling from this all-out assault on our rose-tinted sense of our own country's identity when the Savita case happened, and for those of us who became ardent repeal supporters, that was the straw which broke the camel's back and opened the flood gates of rage, a tide of white-hot fury which had been building inside our psyche's for years and finally could no longer be contained.

I don't know what generation you come from or what values you were raised with regarding your identity and your country as a child, but I can tell you that nobody who didn't experience it will ever be able to understand how unbelievably soul-crushing it was to witness our country's spectacular fall from grace in such a gruesome and sudden manner. It's a feeling I will never forget and I suspect nor will most people of my generation; indeed I'd argue that it eclipsed the 2008 recession and its ongoing fallout in terms of the amount of psychological harm done to these people.

It is utterly ignorant and offensive to describe any of this as a bandwagon or a virtue signalling exercise. Today, as with the gay marriage vote several years ago, feels like we're finally getting the chance to punch back against this corrosive force of social conservatism which led to so much heartache for this country, both those who directly experienced it and those who had to learn about it on the Six One news after spending their lives in sheltered ignorance of what a truly awful legacy this country now has to come to terms with.

In that context, as far as I'm concerned, the people who drove this campaign have earned their celebration. They've been waiting for this moment for more than ten years (in the case of Gen Y whose rude awakening was the Ryan Report) and for many decades (in the case of older generations who have been waiting for this day since the amendment was created in 1983).

Anyone who believes this to be an insincere exercise in narcissistic self-indulgence hasn't got a f*cking clue what they're talking about.