Feminism, silence and digital mediation in Ireland’s abortion archive

This article examines the collecting that occurred after the 2018 referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, using the collections database as a lens for understanding how this recent period of Irish history is currently being narrativized. The Eighth Amendment prohibited abortion in almost all circumstances by equating the life of a pregnant person to that of the unborn child; its repeal was a result of four decades of grassroots, feminist campaigning. The collections now being preserved depict this activism, and are made up of campaign documents, photographs, and first-person stories archived from Facebook. Through a close analysis of the database of the Digital Repository of Ireland, where most of these materials are held, this article argues for an interpretation of the database as a political infrastructure, which refracts existing tensions surrounding the future of Irish feminisms and the activist archive. It also examines the database’s politics of visibility in relation to the shame and silence that defined women’s position in Ireland prior to the referendum and advances a theorisation of the archival database as a historiographical technology, which plays an active role in the production of Irish identity in the wake of the Eighth.