Title: Repeal the Eighth and Reproductive Rights: Sources of stress within campaigning

Images:
Image of clouds and a street light.
Image of a bridge with a banner saying Rise And Repeal.
Image of a mobile phone taking a picture of a mural. The mural is of a heart, and inside the heart is the word Repeal.
Image of a computer with a spreadsheet on a table. There are papers on the table. There is a flipchart in the background.

Transcript

Actor: Elizabeth from ARC talks about the stress of campaigning work

Voice 1: Elizabeth: 
I used to be really bad at saying no to things, I would just be like, okay that is another thing that needs to be done and you would add it to the list, yes that is a great idea.  So I think I had a very mild nervous break at one point where it was just like, nooo... 
And actually I think it was Henry’s partner, Jane, took me aside, it was during this workshop that we were doing and it was about self-care and UK activists had come over to talk to us about being better at looking after ourselves and stuff.  

And she was basically like ‘what would happen if you said no?’  
And I said,’ I don't know’.  
And she was like, ‘the thing wouldn't happen’.  
And I was like, ‘I know’.  
And she was like, ‘and that is fine, sometimes things don't happen’.  
And I was like, ‘sometimes things don't happen’.  
I felt, especially something about being unemployed as well where I felt like this was the only valuable thing that I was doing in my life so I would work super hard to make sure that it was good.  So I think just the fear of stuff going wrong.  
So I think just the fear of stuff going wrong. 
 I remember meeting the guards, and this was a couple of years later, around the route for marching, you know when they stopped allowing people through...It was just really stressful, it was me and four guards. I thought I would just be chatting to one guard but there was four of them and then the Thursday before the Saturday march they were like, ‘So where are you getting your barricades from’?  
And I was like, what barricades are you talking about?  We have done this for several years and we have never had any barricades.  
They essentially intimated that because of the spate of the terrorism, people driving their cars into crowds, that we needed to have barricades.  
And I am sitting there going like an aluminum barricade manned by a volunteer isn't going to stop some man in a truck.  

It was just really, like I think me and the guard.  We didn't get on very well.
I was like,’ I feel like you are being unnecessarily hostile’. 
And he was like, ‘well I feel the same’.  
It was like two people who had a lot of therapy trying to communicate with each other.  
…  And also I would be lying if I said fear of conflict wasn't something else that stressed me a lot. That I might do something wrong and get called out for it or that I might do something wrong like let the organisation down, that it would reflect poorly on other people if I did anything.  So trying to not put a foot out of line … not to say that I didn't or anything, but it was stressful.	

Actors: Kylie talks about the stresses she felt in her campaigning work
Voice 2: Kylie 
I found everything about activism really stressful, it felt like penance, like we were doing penance.  And I think it has been sold like that to a lot of people, activism in general, but it can be fun and therapeutic and empowering and healing.  And that is how you get not burnt out activists who have to leave the movement.  The activism that I do now is healing to me and makes me more powerful and better and stronger as a person.  

So yeah I remember being called a killer at my first street stall, being verbally abused and attacked at street stalls and just having to keep going.  The sheer difficulty of meetings, the inter-person difficulty of meetings was exhausting, how serious everything was, relationally how cold things were.  Or it felt to me and I am factoring in my mental health into all this as well but it didn’t' feel like a place to make friends.  It didn't feel like a place to betray vulnerability and to say I am sad, I am personally involved in this, I can't be there next week because I am going to be crying.  
And as well then so there was no self-care so you go to a stall and you get called a murderer and people spit at you and threaten to do things to you and stuff and then you just go home and no one says, are you all right or do you want to go for a drink or a coffee?  You know, that stuff, that stuff became incredibly important to me and to all of us in the work that we did later.  
And it is because there just wasn't enough people to do it. It is not that anyone in particular wasn't a nice a person, everyone was a lovely person but there were just so few of us and we were all so tired.  
But then as I said creative activism... I think myself that a lot of people who have been doing this serious activism for years were really happy to see creativity coming in and felt a bit happier about everything and it gave them a chance to laugh and stuff like that, that is how it felt like.  

Further Information
Audio-visual resourses developed by the project “Sharing Best Practices in how Civil Society Organisations use the Internet in Organising and Building for Socio-Economic Rights and Trust”

Dr Aileen O’Carroll, Maynooth University
Dr David Landy, Trinity College Dublin
Dr Máire Ní Mhórdha, Maynooth University

This project was funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and sponsored by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC).
The animations were created by Paper Panther Productions at https://www.paperpanther.ie/
Interviewees who asked to be anonymised have had their words read by an actor.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International license.
The full collection, including additional audio-visual resourses, is available at the following link https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.kh04tb834
Aileen O’Carroll, David Landy, & Máire Ní Mhórdha. (2020) Repeal the Eighth and Reproductive Rights, Digital Repository of Ireland [Distributor], Irish Qualitative Data Archive [Depositing Institution], https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.kh04tb834