The museum began a programme of rapid response or contemporary collecting in the mid 2010s in response a number of seminal events in Irish culture, the first of which centred around the referendum on marriage equality in 2015. Under the direction of the curator Brenda Malone, the museum collected ephemera relating to the political campaigns. This included the campaign materials for the referendum on the constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland in 2018. Malone started collecting political posters the morning after the vote, as well as putting a call out on social media for members of the public to donate items relating to the campaign, on both sides, to the museum using the hashtags #Archivingthe8th and #Collectingthe8th alongside other cultural institutions in Ireland. As Malone has noted, it was more difficult to collect items from the "no" side in the referendum despite attempts to solicit more donations.