The nights are dark, the days short. Light is our friend, but we love the dark. We gather logs and turf and coal and pile them on, willing them to life, poking them to hustle sparks and all to keep the winter at bay. We cuddle, we huddle. It has been this way for thousands of years. For all that has happened since our forebears inched their way north behind melting ice, the more things change the more they remain the same.

That works on short time frames too. Let’s just retreat twenty years, to 1992. In sport, Donegal won their first All-Ireland Senior Football Championship. Kilkenny took the hurling. In the Olympics we won a boxing gold medal with Michael Carruth and a boxing silver with Wayne McCullough. In rugby Ireland toured New Zealand and came close in one test and were whacked in the second.
Sound familiar? Have we a pattern? Groundhog Day?
Well, it’s not just sport. In 1992 unemployment reached what was then a record high of 290,000. And we had a clerical scandal, this time a plain straight sex scandal as Bishop Eamon Casey was revealed to have fathered a son with an American woman not that long before he went cheerleading for the Pope in 1979…
And, of course, in 1992 the country was driven mad over abortion. Back then it was the X case. The Supreme Court lifted the High Court ruling that stopped a 14-year-old girl from going to Britain for an abortion. The abortion was carried out in England. Later in the year there were three referenda on abortion and the right to travel and the right to abortion-related information were supported.
Yeah, I know a lot has happened since then. In 1992 we were poor before we got rich and now we’re poor again. Mind you, we’re looking for handouts from Europe just as we were twenty years ago. But the might of the Catholic Church has crumbled. And we’re all experts on banking and the financial markets. And … and … and…
And here we are again, convulsed by abortion. As always, it’s not because our politicians took it on themselves to do something about it. It’s because they didn’t.
The crisis has been triggered, as always, by a random and unpredictable personal catastrophe, in this case a young Indian woman who died of septicaemia while miscarrying her child. A timely abortion would almost certainly have saved her life…
We know her name and that of her husband. The whole story has been played out and analysed. Once again, everyone’s an expert. And the usual battle lines are forming.
One has a certain sympathy for the present Government. Unlike their craven predecessors, at least in their programme for Government they signalled their intention to legislate for the X case. After 20 years I suppose it’s time.
Bear in mind that two years ago the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ireland had failed to provide for abortion in circumstances where the mother’s life is at risk. Savita Halappanavar’s untimely death perfectly and tragically illustrates just what they were talking about.
Fingers are ready to point. The dogs are loose. The struggle over what kind of inquiry would be implemented has been wrassled in every direction. It is, of course, vitally important to get to the bottom of it. But that shouldn’t distract from the greater wrongdoing which is the inaction of politicians over two decades. They didn’t have the balls. They didn’t have the heart. They didn’t care.
And it exposes a terrible flaw in Irish public decision-making, the belief that if a decision is going to cause trouble then it’s best to let the hare sit. To paraphrase the song, you do it best when you do nothing at all. Sure, aren’t people getting on with it?
Well, they were. And they are. But that doesn’t excuse the inaction. Because anyone could have told them that one day another tragic case would surface. And with it comes all the old baggage.
That baggage is summed up in the statement that “Ireland is a Catholic country”. This, of course, might be said by a non-Irish person to explain a situation rather than as a statement of faith and fatherland. After all, Ireland has the highest percentage of foreign doctors of all European countries and many do not fully get all the peculiar local nuances.
Like, they don’t necessarily ‘do’ Irish solutions to Irish problems.
Whatever, the backdrop to inaction is politicians’ fear of a very well-organised self-styled pro-life movement that successfully herded the lumpen masses for years. But the Irish are now more urban than rural. They may be less amenable to herding.
You know, many of the pro-life herders are activists in the church that has wreaked so much havoc on our society through endemic sexual abuse of children (here and elsewhere).
The thing is, their religion has its origin in a stable in Bethlehem where an unmarried teenage mother gave birth to a child in the company of her partner, an older man who was not the father of her child.
Think about it. Yes, if she’d miscarried at seventeen weeks both she and baby would have died, as many did two thousand years ago. But she didn’t. She went full term and delivered the child.
Some believe he was the son of God, some don’t. But strip away the sclerotic, rotting edifice and root out the Inquisitionists and secret societies and institutionalised corruption and look at how we arrived at this appalling place and ask yourself this: that child, whom they say was born in a stable, what would he make of the cowardice and inaction and hypocrisy that led to the death of a young woman a long, long way from home?
Merry Christmas.