August-September 2018
The Irish High Court has set 17 August as the hearing date of an appeal by Mrs Joanna Jordan against the outcome of the Irish abortion referendum. The Irish Times of 27 July reported that "A stay preventing the result being formally certified by the Referendum Returning Officer continues pending the appeal hearing." Despite zero chance of success barring a miracle, Mrs Jordan's challenge points to public polling data in the days leading up to the vote showing the “No” side closing ground and coming within a few percentage points of those who favoured a “Yes” vote for repealing the Eighth Amendment protection of unborn children. She said it is unrealistic to believe that voters supported repeal by a two-to-one margin after the polling. She alleged that votes were not properly counted and vote tabulations were not conducted publicly. The lawsuit also contends that thousands of Irish voters were paid to return to Ireland from other nations, including pro-abortion students who didn’t have proper voter registration.
Meanwhile, in response to Mr John Dill's letter in the last issue, another Irish reader raises the question of why we take at face value the results of referendums conducted by those who promote the killing of babies?
A Rigged Referendum?
Dear Editor
While I would be the last person to defend modern Ireland, I strongly disagree with the implied and unquestioning trust Mr John Dill places in the integrity of the recent abortion referendum result here. (June-July, pp. 78-80) There are extremely compelling reasons to doubt that this result was an accurate reflection of the way Irish people voted on May 25th.
I can already hear many Catholic trads groaning inwardly about "wacky conspiracy theorists" as they read the above words, but so be it: if such folk ever provide a remotely plausible explanation as to why they place such fideistic faith in the integrity of voting procedures run by those who promote every conceivable abomination under the sun, then I'll take their childish and inane insults seriously.
The logic of 'right-wing' Catholics who take modern referendum and election results at face value is odd, to put it mildly.
In their world, liberals promote abortion, euthanasia, fornication, "marriage" between two persons of the same sex, the chopping off of children's genitals in deference to the transgender agenda, massive nation-changing non-Christian immigration, insane wars and much, much more. But the one thing they draw the line at is rigging elections and referendums. Why such ruthless, amoral people would maintain such scrupulosity in observing democratic procedures is never explained.
By the same token, traditional Catholics will lament the great power the pro-aborts wield in the media, in political parties, the courts, the civil service, business, the trades unions, showbiz, the arts and academia, and so on, but apparently believe that this power does not extend to the fairly simple business of rigging a referendum. In truth, rigging a referendum in a small and institutionally corrupt country like Ireland takes much less effort and much less time than infiltrating the media, the political parties, the trades unions etc., and brings far greater and more immediate rewards.
I do not have time to address the huge anomalies that abound in relation to this referendum, but I'll just make a number of very quick points.
A poll published only four days before the referendum put the pro-abortion side ahead by 12 points: they won by a margin of 32.8 per cent. That's an astonishing leap of 20.8 point in support for abortion in four days. In any other country, such a divergence between poll numbers and official results would render the outcome a joke in public eyes, and the UN would probably declare the contest a government-staged sham.
In an effort to explain away the huge anomalies between poll figures and the final outcome, the Irish media were reduced to claiming that it was all down to "secret yes voters." This is Alice in Wonderland stuff. Given the aforementioned control the pro-aborts wield in the Irish media and all other key elements of Irish civil society, the notion of large numbers of secret "Yes" voters is utterly preposterous. On the other hand, there is every reason to believe that secret "No" voters [against repealing the Eighth Amendment] numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
Many persons with no right to vote in the referendum were given voting cards. One French Erasmus exchange student who had neither the right nor the wish to vote, revealed that he was sent a voting card, even though he was a (very) temporary resident in the country. A recent University of Cork study revealed that more than 600,000 extra voting cards circulate in Ireland at elections and referedums. On a good day that would be enough fake votes to swing an election in the U.S., never mind a very small country like Ireland.
When asked about this staggering number of extra voting cards in Ireland, a civil service spokesman bleated that one in four voters is asked to provide identification at polling stations in Ireland.
(A) This is not true: no one I know has ever been asked to produce I.D. at a polling station.
(B) Even if it were true, what about the 75 per cent who don't get asked to prove their identity? 75 per cent of 600,000 is 450,000 potentially phony voters.
There is abundant evidence of vote rigging in previous Irish elections and referendums. A YouTube video from the Cork count centre at the time of the crucial second Lisbon Treaty referendum in 2009, shows an unidentified man walking out of the count centre with a ballot box in his hand. There is no police or security presence visible in the centre at all; anybody could — and probably did — do anything they liked with boxes that night.
In the 2009 European elections, a completely chance recount revealed that 3,000 (yes 3,000!) votes had been "misallocated", i.e., stolen from one candidate and given to another. The really revealing thing about this episode was the way both the media and the Garda (the Irish police) completely ignored it. I was reading about the election in the Irish Times the day after the count, and that newspaper simply mentioned the "misallocation" in passing — as if it were just one of those things that happen in all elections. As for the Garda, they refused to investigate the matter.
The same Garda, by the way, openly backed the Yes side in the "gay marriage" referendum, in flagrant breach of the Irish Constitution — which, as in most countries, requires the police to stay out of politics. Exactly how can one trust a state's police force to ensure the integrity of voting procedures, when they break the law themselves by taking sides on the issues being voted upon?
By far the most intriguing things about Irish voting procedures is the way counting is delayed until the day after voting. Given the neurotic fixation of the Irish state class with presenting a high tech, ultra-modern image to the world, this is extremely odd. On the one occasion when the eyes of the world are focused on the country, the Irish state chooses to present the country as a nation of chronic slackers, too soft and shiftless to work through the night counting votes on one day every few years.
Odder still is the fact that no one in the controlled Irish media ever examines this weird anomaly — whereby those with the will to rig the results of elections and referendums have eleven full hours to play around with them — 11 hours in which God knows what can happen to ballot boxes.
Mr Dill provides anecdotes to support his implied contention that the official result of the referendum is valid. My own anecdotal evidence runs completely contrary to his: many folk I know who would normally either support the liberal side on moral questions, or who would stay at home, were strongly motivated to vote No. Indeed many people have expressed deep puzzlement as to how the pro-abortion side easily out-performed the gay marriage side in the official outcomes of the two referendums, even though there was no organised opposition to the gay marriage campaign at all, whereas a huge anti-abortion movement mobilised against the proposed amendment to the Constitution.
A comparison of attendance at the rallies for the two sides deepens this mystery. Pro-life rallies in the run-up to the referendum were huge — often numbering over 100,000. Whereas the pro-abortion rallies had derisory attendances of a couple of thousand hard-core lefties and blue-haired Social Justice Warriors.
So, yes, by all means condemn Ireland. After all, a country where such rigging is endemic is far from blameless — the riggers and those who facilitate them being mostly Irish people too.
But surely elementary prudence should dictate that all Catholics place a very large asterisk around the official outcome of this referendum.
Yours sincerely,
C. J. O'Hehir (Dublin)