[mattmanser]

It says in the article:

Under pressure from Irish politicians and activists, including the non-partisan Transparent Referendum Institute, Google banned all referendum-linked advertising on its sites.

Did this only happen part way through? Or were people still advertising, Google just claimed they weren't?

[ploika]

It happened about a week or two out from the vote, in a campaign that had been officially been running for a couple of months (I can't remember how long exactly), and had seen low-key unofficial campaigning for easily a couple of years at that point.

[rusk]

I think really there's been a lot of campaigning going on since it was first enacted back in 1983. Even the Attorney General warned of unintended consequences.

The supporters of the 8th are highly organised, and motivated (as anyone would be if in their head they actually equated any and all abortion to killing of actual babies), and any revisitation had been continuously thwarted.

However, it's really in the last 5 years since the Death of Savita Halappanavar [0] that the issue took hold in the public consciousness, and campaigning really began in earnest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar

[Rjevski]

Presumably they went under the radar.