“This proud, young, progressive, kind country is our home”: what's next for Ireland after Repeal?

“The North is Next” is the sign that popped up in a corner of the crowd awaiting the count in Dublin Castle on Saturday night, after Ireland voted to Repeal the 8^th amendment.

In another corner, activist Sarah O’Doherty says, a woman was giving away After Eight chocolates.

Soon—the chance was too good to refuse—Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, and Northern Irish leader Michelle O'Neill, had borrowed “The North is Next” and were holding it aloft for the cameras.

The North indeed looks like next—and the campaigners say they will target it.

Despite Unionists pointing to conservatism in the island’s south and declaring that “Home Rule means Rome Rule” since 1921, Northern Irish women now find themselves in the only part of the UK and Ireland where access to abortion is restricted in almost all circumstances.

With the Irish government expected to pass new abortion legislation this year, women will shortly be travelling from the United Kingdom to Ireland for legal terminations, McDonald pointedly noted.

“I think the pressure is now on the North,” says Mary Kenny, who in 1971 was central in the founding of the Irish women's movement.

She, and 48 others, and travelled to Belfast in May 1971 to buy contraceptives on the “condom train,” and bring them back to women in the south. (Contraception was illegal in the Republic of Ireland from 1935 to 1980.)  When they arrived in Belfast, says broadcaster Marian Finucane, more than half of them didn't know what condoms looked like, and “nearly died of embarrassment.”

She, too, has noted the turn to the North.

“After all these years of the Guardianistas berating ‘reactionary’ Catholic Ireland, they’re now discovering that their real target is ‘reactionary’ Protestant Ireland,” the author and journalist adds.  “A nice irony.”

But DUP leader Arlene Foster has come out of the blocks to deny that the referendum result will have any impact on the north.

Of course, when politicians deny something emphatically, it's usually true.

“There is an appetite for change amongst women up there,” says Niamh Kelly, who flew home to Ireland from Hanoi to canvass for the Yes side, while wearing a GAA jersey.

Dublin City councillor Rebecca Moynihan, who on Saturday added an “-ed” to her black “Repeal” jumper, agrees.

“Northern Ireland should not be the only part of this region which doesn’t have access to safe abortion care.”

McDonald, too, suggests the vote will have an impact in Northern Ireland, noting that activists from the UK and Ireland worked together.

“The debate on the 8th amendment was done on an all-island basis,” she argues.

There is political will, too, despite—or perhaps partially because of—Foster’s comments.

Sinn Féinwhich long avoided discussing abortion, to square its being a left-wing party with the fact it broadly represents the Catholic communitynow sees it as an immensely handy leg-up on its DUP rival.

In fact, public opinion studies show Foster's party is lagging behind even its own voters on abortion reform in the North.

One 2016 poll found 73 per cent of DUP voters support access to abortion in cases of rape and incest, while 72 per cent of Protestants (higher than the 68 per cent of Catholics) support expanded abortion access. 100,000 Northern Irish women, in a population of 1.8 million, have sought abortions in England, estimates Alliance for Choice co-chair Emma Campbell.

The DUP's trump cards in Westminster will probably put paid to calls for Parliament to liberalise abortion, despite advocacy over the weekend from women Tory MPs like Penny Mordaunt, Nicky Morgan, Amber Rudd, Justine Greening, and Anne Milton. (Westminster currently has the power to legislate on devolved matters, since the Stormont assembly hasn't sat since last January, and is unlikely to any time soon.)

But there is a case wending its way from the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court with the backing of the Northern Irish Human Rights Council, which argues having no access to abortion is a fundamental denial of human rights.

“It might be the only way we will get it,” says Queen's University Belfast film student Shauna Lawson.

“It seems to me that there is a strong possibility that may well make it through, though on some very restrictive terms,” says Northern Irish blogger Mick Fealty. But judges, even activist judges, are reluctant to push too far, he says.

Further south, the Republic’s Oireachtas will now get on with the task of passing implementing legislation to enshrine a right to choice in the Irish statute book. The father of Savita Halappanavaran Indian-born dentist who died in 2012 of sepsis following a miscarriage, with Galway hospital doctors telling her they could not carry out a termination because Ireland was “a Catholic country”has asked it be called “Savita's Law.”

For many Yes voters, everything now seems excitingly different following a campaign wherein the words of Dubliner Justin Moran, a charity worker“a gang of young women in black jumpers with clipboards and leaflets just kicked the absolute snot out of the biggest gang of bullies and thugs since the Tans.”

Trade union organizer Hazel Nolan, who also travelled home to canvass—this time from Glasgow—also thinks the country has changed. “The outpouring of positive emotions in Ireland is hard to ignore. I originally left because Ireland frustrated me, and I felt I was on the fringe here. But now…” she trails off.

Irish actress and comedian Tara Flynn, who made a one-woman show about travelling for an abortion and was one of the figures at the centre of the Yes campaign, agrees.

“This is our home. Not some fictional 70s postcard hiding misery and shame. This proud, young, progressive, kind country is our home,” she says.