Claims of ‘foreign funding’ of anti-amendment campaign

Published in 20th-century / Contemporary History, Features, General, Issue 2 (March/April 2013), Volume 21

There were claims by some pro-amendment activists that the anti-amendment campaigners were being funded by foreign forces determined to undermine Ireland’s status as the protector of traditional Christian values. Far from this being the case, Andrew remembered how tight the budgets were and the lack of resources available to the activists:

‘We used to do interviews, radio interviews and we had to close all the doors in the shop to do interviews because we only had one phone in the building and that was a pay phone and like, that was up the stairs and the bookshop was on the ground floor and we had rigged up an extension to the ground floor so you could use the phone in the shop. But sometimes—it was a push button phone, so you had to press button A . . . Sometimes there’d be somebody upstairs, a customer because this was a telephone for the customers and they’d be on. There was one woman and she used to be on it to chat and you used to get only three minutes so you’d hear “clunk, clunk” as she put the money in. This was the “internationally funded campaign”—and we used to be waiting downstairs for her to get off the phone so we could do the interview!’

 

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