Noel Whelan: Abortion vote marks a gender revolution in politics

Although a week is famously a long time in politics, it is too soon to truly understand what happened in Ireland last Friday and why. Much of the focus in the coverage after the results was predictably on the implications for the power balance between the parties and politicians already prominent in our political system. The real impact, however, will be across all parties and outside the party system altogether.

One thing which does seem clear is that this referendum marks both a gender shift and a generational shift in Irish political participation. The most striking feature of the squadrons who canvassed across April and May and the tally teams which assembled at count centres last weekend was the prevalence of young women.

On Saturday afternoon at a Together For Yes event in a hotel near the Dublin count centre, it was striking to see a ballroom full of 1,400 activists. Three-quarters of them were female, and most of them were in their 20s or early 30s. Over the last three decades I have been at many large political gatherings, most of which were overwhelmingly male and stale. I have never seen anything as fresh and as female as this campaign.

Anyone visiting the Together For Yes headquarters in the weeks before polling met dozens and dozens of young operatives. Most of them were new to formal politics. All of them, however, were highly skilled in the modern campaign arts.

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Cutting-edge analytics

They channelled a nationwide army of voluntary effort by implementing a technology-assisted and monitored canvass operation. They put in place cutting-edge analytics and impressive crowd-funding operations. They excelled at sophisticated messaging and content-generation for both social and mainstream media.

Prior to the marriage referendum it had been presumed that the young were politically disinterested and would not bother to vote. The Yes Equality campaign in 2015 proved such presumptions wrong. This year’s Together For Yes campaign turned them entirely on their head.

The number of new voters put on the supplementary register before the deadline in May was more than twice that achieved in advanced of the last referendum. The Twitter imprint of #hometovote last week was at least double that of what it was three years ago. The turnout figures for younger voters last Friday was achieved by Yes campaign mobilisation on a scale considerably greater than that for marriage equality.

Even before polling day, opinion polls had recorded an unprecedented level of positive responses from younger voters to questions about whether they intended to vote. Pollsters cautiously discounted for overstatement. On the day itself, however, turnout, especially among young female voters, was best measured by a political Richter scale. The IPSO/MRBI exit polls for this newspaper showed the turnout among young females last Friday was double that in the 2016 election.

Female leaders

As a result of this referendum many more women are likely to step up and seek to be candidates in next year’s local and European elections and in the next Dáil elections whenever it comes. In addition, hundreds of battle-trained female leaders will be offering for roles as campaign managers. The parties would be wise to embrace all such offers.

The dramatic momentum of this referendum campaign will act as an accelerant on the trend already fuelled by the introduction of gender quotas in the 2016 general election. It will provide further energy to the work of organisations like Women for Elections.

The movements which made the referendum happen are likely to exert a profound influence

The closest precedent to the age and gender shift in activism evident last weekend was that which surrounded Mary Robinson’s presidential election victory in 1990, although last weekend’s shift was on a much larger scale.

Many of those women (and men) newly active in the Robinson campaign flocked to Dick Spring’s Labour Party, reinvigorating its ageing ranks and contributing much to the party’s “Spring tide” surge in the 1992 election.

The destination of the activists involved in the abortion referendum is likely to be more disparate. The Social Democrats have had a surge in membership. The other small left-wing parties will also be rewarded for their work on the ground with new recruits. Fine Gael will hope to divert some of the new Simon Harris fan base into its branches.

New activists

If the pattern post the marriage referendum is anything to go by it also seems likely that many of the new activists will throw their lot in with individual candidates rather than any party organisation. That is what happened, for example, in Katherine Zappone’s successful 2016 general election campaign in Dublin South West and Averil Power’s almost-successful campaign as an Independent in Dublin Bay North.

The movements which made the referendum happen, and the forces which ensured its passage, are likely to exert a profound influence not only on how social issues are dealt with in this country, but also on how and who conducts politics.