So now, as the votes are counted from yesterday's farce, and the woman called X has been sharply reminded of how she was raped 10 years ago when she was 14, we might also count the cost of our deep-grained cowardice as a society writes Kevin Myers.
Our political classes have chosen to dress up that cowardice in the raiments of moral superiority, and then turned that sad hobbledehoy into some constitutional form, regardless of whether it is enforceable or not. The outcome is threefold: bad law, bad law, bad law.
Regardless of the outcome of yesterday's vote, there will be another constitutional vote on abortion, and another, and another, until finally we have removed all reference to the issue from the Constitution, where it has no place being. Yet again, we endured a debate in which embryos were, without a flicker of a disingenuous eye, termed "babies", and X and other rape victims could hear the unraped confidently assure them that the trauma of abortion would add vastly to the trauma they had already experienced. If there is a lesson from the sad and sorry farrago that passed for reasoned discussion, it is this: When in doubt, stick to the status quo. Always.
Radical right
That used to be the case in Irish politics. Conservatism inclined people and politicians alike to be reluctant to change things, lest the cure were worse than the illness. That was before the emergence of the radical right, the self-proclaimed moral majorities who used the Constitution to impose their religious view on society generally. This was not a uniquely Irish phenomenon, for it is a weakness in any constitutional society, in which a temporary mood might generate a binding legal instrument to which courts, parliaments and police then become subject for the decades to come.
The most notorious use of a constitutional amendment to engineer behaviour within a democracy was the prohibition of liquor in the US. It did four things rather well. It gave the US a sense of moral superiority; it created an unenforceable law; it drove what it tried to ban either underground, or abroad; and finally it had wholly unintended consequences - the transfer of economic power to criminal gangs.
Moral superiority; unenforceability; concealment and evasion; and unexpected consequence. Now tell me: is there anything remotely familiar about that quartet of outcomes? Does it remind you in any way of the constitutional amendment on abortion of nearly two decades ago, when X was aged four? Each measure was supposed to improve the "moral" tone of their societies, and each proved atrociously counter-productive. The US prohibitionist lobby successfully outlawed liquor, and thereby brought about a moral catastrophe for the nation far greater than what was ever posed by the consumption of alcohol. And the Irish anti-abortion lobby, through the wholly unpredictable legal cogs and judicial flywheels later resulting from the case to involve that little four year-old, then cavorting in pre-school, became the architect of a constitutional clause that would ultimately legalise abortion.
Unintended consequences
Unintended consequences are, of course, not confined to those who seek to change constitutions. We have heard that abortion also has unintended consequences, such as infertility, depression, and suicide. No doubt it does. And prohibitionists in the US could have argued similarly that alcohol sometimes has the same unintended results.
None of these matters should be the subject of constitutional law, and after the experience of 1983, it almost passes belief that we cannot remove all reference to abortion from the Constitution. Instead, we are trying to re-create yet more legal instruments to superintend the moral complexities of the next X-case, or of the mother whose foetus is fatally deformed.
Only absolutists have black-and-white opinions on such moral matters; and that very certainty is what makes their ambition all the more unsustainable within a constitution. Absolutes do not exist in law, which expresses itself by using words with a vast range of subtly different interpretations which will sooner or later have be more closely defined, by judges of the Supreme Court. In such talmudic exegesis, there is neither black nor white, but more usually a soup of grey, with some tantalising chewy lumps which might briefly seem to have the moral certainty the absolutists seek; but only briefly.
Pathological immaturity
The undiscussed subtext of the entire debate has been dear old England, where the raped, the deranged, the unwell, the young, the unwilling, can go for abortions; there it is, a salve and a dustbin and a surgery for Ireland's problems, enabling us to turn our back on our own pathological immaturity and to present our own failure to confront our morally complex problems at home as bizarre proof that we have a morally compassionate and caring society.
It is England which makes this debate one of abstract sanctimony, with the pitilessly virtuous enabled for decades to ignore the tens of thousands of women going to London for abortions. That is what has made the absolutist anti-abortionists' stance so unreal; for they know the really bad cases, the one which would make their absolutism politically unsustainable - the foetus with no head, the mother who will certainly die in labour - will be dealt with in England.
Even if this amendment is passed, the legal complexities which result from its cowardly imprecision will ensure that the issue will come back to our courts, to enrich another generation of our lawyers and to confound another generation of politicians yet again. In other words, as always: the temporary expedient: endlessly, endlessly, the cowardly Irish solution to the complex Irish problem.