COMMENT/Fintan O'Toole: These days, as he drives out from his palace, Cardinal Desmond Connell can see, almost directly across the Drumcondra Road on the north side of Dublin, a handsome new commercial building. The elegant sign says "Beauty at Blue Door" and, just a little less prominently, "Prop Celia Larkin". Engraved into the frosted glass is a slogan: "Relax the mind, nourish the soul".
On offer inside is a full range of adornments for the temple of the holy spirit: bikini wax €15, Brazilian wax €40, St Tropez full body tan €50.79, and reiki ("a simple, natural healing method using the laying-on of hands to transmit energy") €57.14.
It might seem that these are unlikely neighbours: the Taoiseach's partner and the Cardinal who famously snubbed her; the stern cleric who nourishes the soul with tomes of St Thomas Aquinas and the beauty guru who feeds it with waxes, manicures, and facials; the rather divergent interpretations of the laying on of hands.
But the versions of Ireland they represent are perfectly fused in tomorrow's abortion referendum. The proposal that Ms Larkin's partner is asking us to approve is itself a triumph of the beautician's art.
It is the old, unbending dogma of which the Cardinal is a sincere but forbidding proponent, buffed and waxed and tanned into a shape that is not ashamed to display itself before the new hedonistic Ireland.
A mediaeval cruelty that is not acceptable in its stark naked form has had its unwanted hairs plucked, its wrinkles smoothed, its sharp nails glossed and its hard face covered in cosmetics. Call me perverse, but I liked it a lot better before the beauty treatment.
For all the patronising talk of public confusion, the core of the amendment could not be simpler. It is, as both sides agree, essentially about the rolling back of the Supreme Court judgment in the 1992 X case and the subsequent 1997 High Court ruling in the C case. The first case involved a girl of 14 who was pregnant as a result of rape, the second of a girl aged 13 in similar circumstances.
As the law stands, each was found to be entitled to an abortion. If the amendment is passed that entitlement will be taken away. While the X case girl could still travel to England with her parents for an abortion, the C case girl, who was in the care of a health board, could not. The fundamental question, therefore, is whether or not we want to force children who have been raped to carry the rapist's child.
Poignantly, the man at the centre of the X case was convicted last week of again kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 15-year old girl.
This event ought to remind us, not just of the horrific mess which the 1983 anti-abortion amendment led us into, but of the campaign of lies which was mounted by part of the anti-abortion movement in 1992 and 1993.
At the time of the X case there was a widespread, informal smear campaign against the victim, including rumours that she had been impregnated by a "foreign" student.
A book published by Human Life International, The X Case: How Abortion was Brought to Ireland, claimed to reveal the "lies and manipulation" behind the case. We then had Father Michael Cleary, on his Dublin local radio talk show in June 1993, telling us that the X case was "a model . . . planned deliberately to test the amendment" and that there was a great deal of organisation behind it.
The import of all of this was clear: the victim was a liar who was put up to it by sinister pro-abortion forces. Most decent people on any side of this argument would see this for what it was - a disgusting mixture of misogyny, paranoia and cynicism. What such people may not realise is that a cosmetically enhanced version of the same thinking lies directly behind the amendment now being proposed.
Michael McDowell, the Attorney General who drafted the amendment, has told us quite explicitly that women will lie about rape simply to get an abortion.
In July 2000 he told RTÉ that allowing women who have been made pregnant as a result of rape have abortions "might lead to a series of false accusations of rape if the means of access to abortion in Ireland were to be made an accusation of rape.
"It might be thought there would be a temptation to characterise sexual intercourse on an occasion giving rise to a pregnancy as non-consensual with a view to availing of that right."
The Attorney General is a civilised man and his language is much more polite than that of Father Michael Cleary. But the view of women is the same. They are manipulative liars who will make false accusations of rape simply in order to get access to abortion. The explicit slur on the victim in the X case is made vaguer and more general, but it is at the core of the amendment.
Rape is left out of the legal equation because, as the Attorney General has told us, women would make up allegations. The threat of suicide is to be taken out the equation because girls and women would claim to be suicidal when they are not.
Has any Western democracy ever been asked to enshrine such a bleak, cruel view of half of its citizens in its fundamental law?