Following the enactment of the 1979 Family Planning Act, conservative groups sought to reassert Ireland’s traditional morality by demanding an amendment to the Irish Constitution guaranteeing the right to life of the ‘unborn’. The Supreme Court had cited similar arguments to Roe v. Wade in the McGee case, and it was alleged that similar arguments might result abortion being legalised in Ireland. The amendment was passed in September 1983. Following the 1967 British Abortion Act, a growing number of Irish women were travelling to Britain for abortions and this abortion trail grew in the 1980s and 1990s, despite restrictions on abortion referrals. In 1991 the Supreme Court ruled in the X case that abortion was legal in order to save a woman’s life. Three referenda held in 1992 affirmed the right to information about abortion and the right to travel for an abortion and rejected a proposal to reverse the Supreme Court judgement. This referendum was again rejected in 2002. The Pro-Life Amendment hindered the treatment of pregnant women and was a factor in the death of Savita Hallapanuvar in 2012.

The 1970s and 1980s were decades of intense culture wars in Ireland, as the feminist movement did battle with the forces of conservatism over a host of high-profile constitutional issues. It was also a period of feminist awakening in Irish poetry. The poetry of Eavan Boland entered this world somewhat tentatively, beginning to establish its suburban terrain and slowly shedding the more static aspects of that writer’s juvenilia. A very different poet is Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, whose dominant note was from the outset one of uncertainty, searching, and transition. Where Boland will focus on the theme of unrecoverable women’s lives, Ní Chuilleanáin will typically be found actively recovering submerged and lost stories and lives. Medbh McGuckian’s approach is different again, and is often characterised in terms of écriture féminine, though scholarship of her extensive use of intertextuality has added new layers of complexity to our understanding of her work. Other poets, including Nuala Archer, Paula Meehan and Rita Ann Higgins, round out this survey of a busy and radical chapter in the history of modern Irish women’s poetry.

Ireland’s practice of holding referendums to approve European treaties has operated as a significant political barrier in the European integration process. This chapter explains how the practice derives from quite distinctive interpretations of the principles of national sovereignty and popular sovereignty enshrined in the Irish Constitution. In particular, it explains both how popular sovereignty in Irish constitutional law receives a largely procedural and plebiscitary expression, and how national and popular sovereignty have become conceptually intertwined. Although both versions of sovereignty have become integral components of constitutional identity in Ireland, this chapter explains various anomalies and contradictions that arise from each.