A doctor with links to the Iona Institute and who campaigned against the Repeal the 8th movement appears to have donated to a fundraiser for the so-called Freedom Convoy in Canada. It comes as the result of another hack of Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo. The second in a matter of days and the fourth in 12 months, the hack also revealed the entire history of fundraisers and donations on the site.
Iona links
Non-profit and data archivist group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) granted The Beacon access to the results of the hack.
Listed in the data set The Beacon has seen, a Dr. Phil Boyle donated $78.84 to the Adopt-a-Trucker fundraiser. He also commented “Go truckers Go! Thank you and God be with all of you”. Boyle was a member of Doctors for Life in opposition to the campaign to legalise abortion in Ireland. In a 2018 video he claimed there’s no evidence women’s lives are at risk because they don’t have access to abortion. He said “Show me the data. Where is the evidence?”. And he described the movement to abolish the 8th amendment as “unnecessary”.
A fertility specialist, Boyle previously clashed with the Medical Council in 2010 after he refused to treat a couple for their fertility issues because they were unmarried. At the time he was practicing in Galway but has since moved to Dublin where he founded the NeoFertility clinic. Boyle is an expert in what’s known as NaPro Technology, a form of fertility treatment that’s “accepted by the Catholic Church as a way of managing fertility and was developed on the foundational principals of Pope Paul the VI’s Encyclical Letter, Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life)”.
During the controversy the Iona Institute came out in support of Boyle. A spokesperson at the time argued that “He should never have been called before its fitness to practise committee. The fact that it heard a professional misconduct charge against him is simply grotesque”.
Boyle’s wife, Evana, also currently serves on the board of Iona. She’s previously campaigned with the Mothers and Fathers Matters group against the 2015 referendum which legalised same-sex marriage. Speaking to the Washington Post at the time, she said Ireland was “no longer Catholic” and that, if successful, the referendum would change “an institution that has been known as one man and one woman since the beginning of time”.
Ms. Boyle is the daughter of the now deceased Máire Kirrane, a member of the Nora Bennis-led National Party which was later renamed to the Catholic Democrats. The party ran on an anti-abortion and pro-family platform. Kirrane herself ran as a candidate for the group in the 1997 general election due to, as she stated at the time, “the anti-family/anti-life stance of the main parties”.
Freedom fundraising
In the first hack from earlier this week The Beacon uncovered a number of Irish donors. Included amongst them is a contributor to Gript as well as the manager of an equity firm in Dublin. Also included appears to be anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination GP Dr. Pat Morrissey. In total, Irish contributors to the first fundraiser sent $7,226 to the Canadian anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination movement, with the average donation coming to $44.60. Although there were fewer Irish donations to the Adopt-a-Trucker fundraiser, a total of $573.96 still came from Ireland.
The hack is another serious blow GiveSendGo has suffered in a matter of days. In a statement it published after the initial hack in the early hours of Monday, it accused the hackers of being “malicious” and that it intends on “pursuing actions against their cybercrime”. The statement went on to say “We are in a battle”. In a subsequent tweet the Christian site wrote “We are on the side of FREEDOM!! [sic]”.
According to Vice, the hacker who’s taken responsibility for hacking GiveSendGo has been the victim of death threats as a result of his actions. During a livestream in which he took credit for the hack, Aubrey Cottle, aka Kirtaner, said “It was worth it”.
Featured image via Screenshot
