How 99 strangers in a Dublin hotel broke Ireland's abortion deadlock

Ninety-nine random strangers, a North Dublin hotel and a lot of cups of tea and coffee – not exactly the stuff of political revolution.

Yet little more than a year later, it appears that an unlikely assemblage of housewives, students, ex-teachers, truck drivers and others has brought Ireland to the brink of radical change to its abortion laws.

They met as a Citizens’ Assembly at the end of 2016, a mix of pro-lifers, pro-choicers and undecideds whose views broadly reflected opinions in the wider Irish population.

In all, it took five weekends. But at the end of it, they voted for change. In doing so, they did not just pave the way for an abortion referendum in May, details of which were announced today. They showed the world what democrats can do with a little imagination.

In a world in which democracy desperately needs revitalisation and new ideas, innovators point to Ireland. They see the move to randomly select a jury to thrash out the issue before a public vote as a breakthrough moment.

“Many people were concerned this would be a can-kicking exercise; that proved not to be the case,” says Colm O’Gorman, the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland.

A referendum was scarcely imaginable when the idea of an assembly was first mooted in 2016.

Back then, few politicians dared even raise the subject of a public vote, let alone voice support for abortion rights. To do so risked electoral oblivion, or so the conventional logic went. As a result, Irish women faced the perpetuation of some of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws, under which at least 170,000 women travelled abroad for abortions in the years since 1980, mainly to England and often in secret.


Source: theguardian