IWD march in Dublin as government finally forced to call Repeal referendum
Channel: Workers Solidarity Movement
Date: 2018-03-15

March 8th is International Women's Day and IWD 2018 in Ireland was a big day because it was when it was confirmed that a referendum to Repeal the hated 8th amendment to the Irish constitution would go ahead.  Demonstrations and other events took place across Ireland to mark this, the video shows one of these, the IWD march in Dublin taking place just after work at 17.30 on a Thursday evening.

The audio from the video after a few seconds is overlaid with the WSM International Women's Day statement which you can read at https://www.wsm.ie/c/wsm-international-womens-day-message2018

An national anti-choice march took place the following Saturday with free buses laid on from around the country.  The organisers had told media ahead of that march they expected 120,000 but on the day only 9,000 people turned up.  Because they then tried to spin that number into 100,000 a major controversy erupted about that claim and media reporting of the claim, you can read more about how many actually marched at https://www.wsm.ie/c/save8rally-proof-9k-not-100k

For those curious about how many marched on the workday evening we didn't do the same counting operation but afterwards we did use the same Crowdsize App to calculate that no more than 6000 people could fit into the space the rally at the end occupied if it was densely packed.  The end of the video is shot there so you can judge for yourself whether thats a densely packed crowd.   If you are interested in comparing the mobilisation ability of both sides then, rather than using this weekday evening march, we’d suggest looking at the September March for Choice which was also a national mobilisation on a Saturday.  It’s an easy comparison as it followed the same route and held its rally at the same endpoint - that comparison reveals it to have been the somewhat bigger of the two, see above article for details.

For more details see https://www.wsm.ie/c/dublin-international-womens-day-referendum-repeal-8th-2018