Mná Na hÉireann  ## Metadata - Author: [[Heather Burns]] - Full Title: Mná Na hÉireann - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #ireland - #reproductiverights - #privacy - #encryption - #techpolicy - #wordcamp - #feminism - #humanrights Author: Heather Burns Source: Personal blog Reference: https://heatherburns.tech/2024/11/06/mna-na-heireann/ date created: 2025-08-21 00:00 --- # Title: Mná na hÉireann ## Table of Contents: - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📖 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-deib-inclusion-and-belonging-assessment) - [✅ Logical validity](#-logical-validity) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### References: Include a list of sources consulted and cited in the article. - Irish Times live blog (referenced narratively) - Savita Halappanavar mural image credit: Zcbeaton, CC BY-SA 4.0 - GDPR (EU General Data Protection Regulation) ## 📝 Summary: Heather Burns connects the Irish “repeal the Eighth” referendum and the death of Savita Halappanavar to current US politics and reproductive rights, arguing that technologists, policymakers, and community members must become “Mná na hÉireann” (women of Ireland)—mutual protectors of women’s privacy, safety, and autonomy. She issues three imperatives: adopt end-to-end encryption everywhere, conduct concrete threat-modeling and reproductive privacy exercises for one’s own work, and avoid travel to the US if biologically capable of conceiving due to escalating legal and health risks. She contrasts Europe’s GDPR protections with the absence of comparable safeguards in the US and calls for immediate, practical action. Note on position: You’ve read 100%. ## 📖 Main Content: The essay opens with a personal memory from Belfast on the day of Ireland’s repeal referendum, foregrounding how Savita’s preventable death catalyzed a national reckoning. It then pivots to the present US context, warning that recent electoral outcomes portend systemic harms to women’s health and autonomy. Burns reframes responsibility for safety within the tech and policy communities: prioritize encryption, stop using non-E2EE DMs, and build a habit of privacy-by-default. She prescribes a hands-on exercise: create a risk table, watch a short scenario video, and map how one’s own products, data flows, and policies could enable harm—then repeat her September “Reproductive Privacy, Data, and Your Work” challenge. Finally, she advises those capable of pregnancy to avoid traveling to the US, grounding this in a harm-reduction frame. She underscores Europe’s GDPR as a rights-based privacy regime versus the US vacuum. ### 🗒️ Notes - Irish context and catalyst - Memory of Belfast during repeal vote; pride in collective action. - Savita Halappanavar’s death due to denial of urgent care while fetal heartbeat persisted. - Social media, timing, and public empathy broke long-standing policy inertia. - Moral and political framing - Savita as a negative role model: exemplar of what must never recur. - US electoral outcomes framed as enabling more preventable deaths. - Call for solidarity: “You’re the Mná na hÉireann now.” - Practical directives - Encryption as “foundational principle.” - Cease non-encrypted DMs (e.g., some apps, X). - Avoid being “a walking threat model.” - Threat-modeling exercise - Make a table; watch a 90-second scenario; map issues to workstreams and data. - Identify how your work could be weaponized without your awareness. - Reproductive privacy learning exercise - Revisit September exercise on reproductive privacy, data handling, and safeguards. - Travel and harm reduction - Strong advisory: those capable of conceiving should not travel to the US. - Prioritize personal safety over business, conferences, or leisure. - Normalize remote alternatives (Zoom) and shift burden of travel. - Regulatory contrast - GDPR: comprehensive, rights-centric, with heightened protection for health data. - US: lacks comparable safeguards—“have fuck all.” - Tone and ethos - Urgent, candid, sometimes profane for emphasis. - Appeals to duty within tech/policy communities; human-rights lens. ## 📖 References: - GDPR overview: European data protection framework granting high protection to health data. - Irish Times coverage (narrative reference). - Wikimedia Commons image attribution for Savita mural (Zcbeaton, CC BY-SA 4.0). ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1) Original idea: Savita’s death shattered complacency and mobilized Irish women. Paraphrase: The tragedy of Savita Halappanavar—its visibility, timing, and her evident dignity—punctured Ireland’s decades-long acceptance of the Eighth Amendment. Women across Ireland transformed grief into collective will, compelling the state to put abortion restrictions to a national vote. 2) Original idea: Three immediate steps—encrypt, threat-model, avoid US travel for at-risk individuals. Paraphrase: From today, treat end-to-end encryption as non-negotiable, abandon insecure direct messages, and stop creating risk for others. Build a concrete risk table after viewing a short scenario, then map how your own products could be used to harm. Finally, if you can become pregnant or miscarry, don’t travel to the United States; choose safety over business as usual. ## 📰 Newsletter: Learning web development, privacy-first. Big week across the community: we’re doubling down on secure defaults. If your DMs aren’t end-to-end encrypted, move now—no “later.” For builders, try a 90-second scenario drill: sketch a quick table of your data flows, who can request them, and where logs live. Then ask: could this be used to criminalize health decisions? On the WordPress front, we’ve seen fresh momentum around privacy-by-design plugins—think audit trails that exclude sensitive fields, anonymized analytics, and encrypted form submissions. Community highlights: teams are running contributor sessions on data minimization and consent UX; shoutout to organizers piloting “privacy threat modeling” as a contributor day track. New plugins to watch: lightweight E2EE contact forms, log scrubbers, and GDPR-compatible DPO toolkits. If you speak or teach, bake privacy scenarios into your workshops—ship a worksheet, not just slides. Links worth your time: the GDPR’s special category data guidance and reproductive privacy primers. Keep building the open web, but build it safe. ## ✅ Action Items: Framed for a GoDaddy Developer Advocate focused on open source, WordPress, and education, aspiring to OSPO leadership: - Map alignment to open-source advocacy - Position encryption and privacy as default practices in OSS projects (docs, configs, CI). - Advocate for minimal data collection and encrypted-by-default patterns in WordPress plugins/themes. - Contributor engagement - Create contributor-day tracks on reproductive privacy threat modeling; publish a template risk table and scenarios. - Mentor maintainers on data-retention policies, log redaction, and incident response for sensitive requests. - Education and curriculum - Develop workshops: “E2EE for WordPress and PHP,” “Data minimization in REST APIs,” “Safe telemetry patterns.” - Provide TTS/audio summaries and hands-on labs to reach diverse learners. - OSPO trajectory - Draft org-wide policies on sensitive data handling, government data requests, and contributor safety. - Establish a privacy review in the project lifecycle; add threat modeling checkpoints before release. - Transparency and inclusivity - Publish transparency reports on data requests and takedowns. - Create safe participation guidelines for contributors in hostile jurisdictions. - Concrete next steps - Replace non-E2EE comms with secure alternatives for teams. - Add privacy-linting to CI; audit logs for sensitive events. - Issue a public playbook: “Reproductive Privacy, Data, and Your Work” adapted to - Summary: I have a vivid memory, and a treasured one, of sitting in a cafe in Belfast, looking south, beaming with pride. - URL: https://heatherburns.tech/2024/11/06/mna-na-heireann/ [](https://heatherburns.tech/2024/11/06/mna-na-heireann/) I have a vivid memory, and a treasured one, of sitting in a cafe in Belfast, looking south, beaming with pride. I just happened to be down there, for a WordCamp in fact, on the day that the Republic of Ireland held its “repeal the Eighth” referendum on its constitutional provision which, in the name of banning abortion, also banned essential, immediate, and lifesaving reproductive health care. Ireland’s deeply religious legacy had demanded that as the norm for decades, and so it was. But the catalyst for the referendum, after so many decades of people just accepting that norm, was Savita. She was a healthy, 31-year-old, happily married woman who, through no fault of her own, miscarried her desperately wanted baby, just 17 weeks in. Miscarriage doesn’t just mean that the pregnancy is no longer viable. It means that the baby transfigures into poison. If the miscarried foetus is not removed, it becomes a toxin that kills its mother from the inside out. Which is why Savita, a medical professional who knew how this all worked, presented at A&E in agonising pain, expecting urgent medical care. But technically the unviable foetus still had a heartbeat. So the hospital made Savita lie in a hospital bed, *dialated*, for three days, waiting for her to pass the dead foetus naturally, *so that the hospital would not break the eighth amendment*. Three days. Of course, by that time, [she’d gone septic](https://www.hse.ie/eng/services/news/nimtreport50278.pdf). That hospital was where, and why, [Savita died at 31](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar), a week after coming in for a basic emergency procedure which should have seen her sleeping in her own bed that same night. There was something about her death – perhaps it was social media? perhaps it was her integrity and vulnerability? perhaps it was just the changing times? – which broke the spell that the eighth amendment had held for so long. *Mná na hÉireann* are a force of nature, and the government was pushed to take it to a referendum. As I enjoyed my coffee – and Belfast does great coffee – I scrolled through the Irish Times’ live blog as the day progressed, almost physically feeling the power of their sheer will pushing outward. What finally brought the tears was seeing many of the women making a pilgrimage to a mural of Savita after they voted, so that they could honour her in whatever ways felt right, as if voting *Yes* to repeal was not already the highest honour they could offer. [](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Savita_Halappanavar_mural,_Dublin.jpg)Savita’s mural, the day after the referendum. Photo by Zcbeaton, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons It’s morning in America, as someone once said, and you’re as sleep deprived as I am. A little bit ragged and emotional too. Which means you’re probably wondering what a six-year-old anecdote from Ireland has to do with anything. Sadly, it’s everything. For the voting women of Ireland, Savita was a role model in the worst way: an exemplar of what cannot and must not ever be allowed to happen. She was also a call for women to look after each others’ backs, and wombs too. It pains me to report that yesterday the voting women of America, and many men too, adopted her as a role model as well, but not as a force for good. They have no intention of having other women’s backs. They want Savita as an exemplar of what can, and should, happen to women every day, everywhere. They want more dead women, they are [already getting them](https://people.com/texas-teen-suffering-miscarriage-dies-due-to-abortion-ban-8738512), and they are not going to stop until no one knows their names because there are too many to count. (That dead American girl’s name, for what it’s worth, was Neveah. That’s “heaven” spelled backwards. Christian Nationalism does not do irony, or for that matter actual Christianity.) But does the result of America’s presidential election mean anything for you, not in America, just working on your thing, whether that’s law, policy, regulation, or code? Yes it does. It means you’re the *Mná na hÉireann* now. You’ve got to look out for women, and have each others’ backs, and wombs. So what can you do, after you get a decent night’s sleep? #### Zero. Your new foundational principle is end-to-end encryption. On everything. Full stop. If you are communicating with someone on a non-encrypted DM, such as certain apps or X, *fucking stop it now*. Stop being a walking threat model. Stop exposing others to risk. #### First. Grab a notebook. A physical one, like conference swag. (You’d better get used to that.) Make a table that looks like this. | Isssue | What I know | What I need to find out | | --- | --- | --- | | Political | | | | Regulatory | | | | Technical | | | | My work? | | | Now watch this. It’s only 90 seconds long. That video is how things are going to work for the next few years. So fill out your table with all of issues which that video presents. If you don’t know the answers, do your research. In the row that says “my work”, think of how your work could become part of that video without you even realising it. Here's just one example if you're stuck. #### Second. Now that you’ve had the warmup, revisit the learning exercise [I set forth in September](https://heatherburns.tech/2024/09/03/your-autumn-2024-privacy-conference-talk-challenge/) about reproductive privacy. I meant it as a conference talk challenge, but we don’t have time for that anymore, so I’ll just repeat the exercise here: Reproductive Privacy, Data, and Your Work What is the goal of this exercise Reading material Points to cover #### And third. Third is that whatever age you are, if you are biologically capable of conceiving, consensually or not, and/or are therefore capable of miscarrying, you would be a fool to even set foot in America for the foreseeable future. And by “fool” I mean “stupid fucking idiot”. Don’t. It’s not worth it. Forget business trips, forget company meetups, forget conferences, forget holidays, forget fucking Disneyworld, forget gigs, forget sporting competitions, forget everything. Just forget it. For that matter, forget your friends and relatives: after all, people who really care about you don’t put you at physical risk, nor do they care about your long term physical absence either. They can come see you, over here. You don’t have to go there. If that’s not possible, switch back to seeing them on Zoom. Goodness knows we had enough practice with that, after all. If you walk alone and unprotected through a dark street at night, no one has any sympathy for you for what happens next. America has chosen to be a dark street at night. You’ll live just fine without it. You might not if you choose otherwise. There’s so much more to come and so many things we all have to do but this is day one. Start. *Tá, Savita.* By sheer coincidence, the Irish “repeal the eighth” referendum was held on the same day that GDPR went into effect across Europe. Those two events were unrelated. But the women of Europe have a comprehensive privacy law anchored in personal control over their data, and rights over its misuse, through a continent-wide law which grants health data the highest levels of privacy protection. The women of America have fuck all. Always remember that. The Author I’m a UK tech policy wonk based in Glasgow. I work for an open web built around international standards of human rights, privacy, accessibility, and freedom of expression. The content and opinions on this site are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of any current or previous team., Mná Na hÉireann, Heather Burns, 01jc13cqv5exdgfx2sehdpq4z0.