With next year’s referendum on the eighth amendment, we’ll be revisiting the fight for Ireland’s socio-political future.

This time three years ago we were heading into a new year knowing we had a fight on our hands. No date had been called yet on the marriage referendum, but the LGBT troops had already begun galvanising in the knowledge that it was going to be a hard fought battle, especially with Ireland’s easily exploitable rules about equal representation in the media and the propaganda already coming from the No side.

Two days after Ireland voted by an overwhelming majority for equal marriage, the Iona Institute’s David Quinn, writing about the ‘liberal agenda’ in the Irish Independent said: “I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a referendum to remove the pro-life clause of our Constitution in the next two or three years.”

He was bang on the money, because on December 13 cross party on abortion committee members voted 14 to six in favour of repealing the eighth amendment, which leads the way for a referendum to be held next year. According to the Taoiseach it will be as early as next May.

This, of course, is good news. However if you thought the fight around equal marriage was a head-fuck, this is going to be far worse. All the Iona gang will be out in force for the battle they’ve been waiting on all along, the one they see as shaping Ireland’s entire socio-political future. And although the LGBT+ community seems largely in favour of repeal, we’ll have our own enraged commentators out there too. (Hopefully for one of them, the referendum won’t be held on May 12, the same day as the Eurovision takes place in far-off Kiev.)

Across the country, many of us got out and canvassed in the lead-up marriage referendum, and while that presented its challenges, they will be naught compared to the challenges of canvassing for a Yes to Repeal. Pro-life campaigners have already being going door-to-door in every county, telling people that a vote to repeal the eighth will open the floodgates for abortion on demand. It’s likely that No campaigners will be selling the story that there’ll be an abortion clinic on every corner in the wake of a referendum win.

Of course, some LGBTs don’t think repeal is a queer issue, but as Ailbhe Smyth of the Coalition to Repeal the 8th Amendment wrote in these pages last year: “Abortion is a socio-sexual issue. So too was the whole issue of marriage rights for lesbian and gay people. It’s about being able to control our destinies, and the way in which we’re seen, and the kinds of options that we have, the kinds of decisions that we can make about our lives. It’s about how we view sexuality and the definition and control of sexuality in our country; it’s absolutely of a piece.”

The first five months of 2018 are going to be gruelling, but we’re staying positive in GCN Towers, with our eyes firmly on a Yes vote. David Quinn may have been right when he said a referendum on the eighth would be next, but that was because with the marriage referendum vote he understood the tide had already turned and the Ireland of old, where the Catholic Church controled our lives, was gone forever.