I remembered the particular protest very well: in my memory it was a protest over the High Court decision to prevent 14-year-old ‘Miss X’ from travelling to Britain for an abortion, a protest held within days of that decision becoming public in February 1992, and nothing whatsoever to do with the three-part referendum that eventually took place in November of that year. So it seemed to me the caption was almost completely wrong: characterising the protesters as ‘pro-choice’ - though they may individually have been just that, it was not the character of this event; using the odd verb ‘campaign’ for people who were sitting down in Merrion Street to block traffic; and referring to the referendum rather than the X Case, when this protest was “before” the referendum only in roughly the same sense that it was ‘before’ the Summer Olympics of the same year.
But in addition to the wrongly described protest, I also remembered something special about this photograph, which had, I was sure, graced the front-page of the
Irish Times, where I worked at the time. Even today I can name some of the people shown in the picture, but that’s not why it’s so memorable. Look at the banner the women are carrying: isn’t it odd that a large display of this nature would have so much blank space on it? I knew the reason that the photo showed this blank space, and I was pretty sure the Irish Times had explained it at the time.
Luckily the third-level institute where I teach has free access to the full digital archives of the newspaper. It wasn’t entirely a straightforward search, but I knew roughly the date I was looking for, so it didn’t take me long ‘flipping’ through the newspaper to find the picture, just as I remembered it, on the front page, 18 February 1992, looking exactly the same as it does above -- apart from the crummy reproduction on the old archives -- and exactly as it did in the December 2010 version, but with this helpful caption:
A demonstration yesterday outside Government Buildings against the High Court injunction forbidding a 14-year-old alleged rape victim from obtaining an abortion in Britain. The banner includes a telephone number which has been deleted by the Irish Times, in compliance with the High Court ruling of December 1986, which found that the provision of assistance, including information, to a pregnant woman seeking an abortion was in breach of Article 40 of the Constitution. This judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court in February 1988. -- (Photograph: Eric Luke)
The number was that of the Women’s Information Network, probably the finest group of activists I have ever met, women who voluntarily staffed an essentially illegal helpline to assist women seeking abortion information and referral. After so many protests back in those days, I can still sing the number, ‘Six seven nine four seven oh oh -- women have the right to know!’ So the Irish Times was making a point about censorship and about the ban on abortion information by printing this photograph in 1992. They might, however, have made the point more strongly by, for example, blacking out the number rather than whiting it out; the photo-desk technicians eliminated the phone number quite artfully, by a darkroom process called ‘dodging’, by which you block out an area of an image while printing it, leaving nothing but the white photographic paper showing. White paper, white banner -- you’d hardly realise that anything was missing.
By a strange coincidence, the 18 December 2010 story in the Irish Times, by Carl O’Brien, was headlined, right above the doctored photo: ‘No more dodging the abortion issue’.
We should be so lucky. Because a “dodged” print of Eric Luke’s photo found its way into the Irish Times picture archive; and one assumes because its crucial explanatory caption was either not archived with it or was lost along the way, perhaps in the transition to digital; and probably because the people who might have carried the institutional memory of what happened to that photo are no longer around the place; because of some combination of all those things, the Irish Times, in 2010, forgot. And so -- in contravention of its own guidelines, which require it to inform readers when photos have been altered -- the newspaper presented a literally false picture of what was happening in 1992, when so much of what we knew and debated about abortion hinged on a seven-digit telephone number.
