Confusion reigns supreme and the posters are guilty as hell. In essence, that is the emerging media consensus about the abortion referendum. The standard introduction to radio and TV items, in this second-last week of the campaign, has the reporter bemoaning the confusion, while newspapers and TV programmes, including the Late Late Show, have promoted the competing posters to a suddenly central role equalled only by the position achieved by curling in the Winter Olympics.
Underpinning this pattern is a clear assumption that somebody, somewhere, is culpable of confusion-creation. This is matched by an unspoken belief that if the political parties, or the Referendum Commission, or the ad agencies had done their job properly, the electorate would not, now, be faced with an inappropriate challenge to its attention span and analytical powers.
It's as if the electorate was entitled to brief, inarguable simplicity: don't bother them with the facts and above all, don't bother them with conflicting evidence from experts: remember the old KISS rule - Keep It Simple, Stupid.
This is the wrong context for the KISS rule. Brief, inarguable simplicity is the imperative if you manufacture tiny tubes of honey-roasted peanuts stacked for impulse purchase at the cash desk of a petrol station convenience store.
Political decisions with major potential impact are not made on the basis of brief, inarguable simplicity except in totalitarian states. A recurring theme of media coverage of the referendum campaign, nonetheless, is that such black-and-white clarity is a national entitlement, that it is achievable, and that failure to achieve it is definitely someone's fault.
The reality is that there is no such entitlement, no such clarity is achievable, no fault accrues, and - rather more importantly - that complexity, subtlety and balancing of shades of grey are not beyond the electorate. The electorate is not as dumb as it looks in opinion polls and vox pop reports.
The search for simplicity is media-driven. Reporters are storytellers by nature, training and job specification. The international attention span is shortening.
Where those two factors intersect most challengingly is in news broadcasting, where the ideal story is discrete, with a beginning, middle and end and a stock conflict (victor/vanquished, villain/victim) thrown in.
In that context, the abortion referendum story is deadly. Whereas, in the beginning, we had a relatively neat either/or choice and a manageable dramatis personae, as the campaign progresses, complexities and contradictions have broken out on all sides and mutually opposed authority figures proliferate in number every day.
The repeated whinges about "confusion" do a disservice to the electorate. Many people who, at the opening of the campaign, believed they were sure of how they would vote are less certain now. They rightly perceive new implications for either a Yes or a No vote based on what they have read or heard in the ensuing weeks.
This not a comfortable experience. Change never is. Certainty is always more comfortable - and a lot more dangerous. Certitude is the great enemy of learning, development and growth.
In fact, the sowing of uncertainty in the public mind on an issue, such as abortion, which touches on the visceral convictions of individuals, may prove to be a significant contribution to compassion and tolerance.
Media are too ready with simplistic interpretations of voter uncertainty on issues like this, partly because they surrender so easily to the categories of market research: Yes, No or Don't Know. That last category is a myth. In Ireland, we rarely don't know. We just use the phrase to get rid of the interrogator with the clip-board.
But just as someone who says "Grand" in response to a query about how they're doing may be anywhere on the continuum between ecstatic and suicidal, someone responding with Don't know when surveyed about a sensitive issue could be anywhere on the continuum between Don't care and "Care too much to discuss it".
Protecting the public from complexity is not the function of media. Nor is letting the public off the hook by diagnosing them as confused. The onus is on politicians, activists and medical or legal experts to articulate the issues as they see them.
The onus is on media to present all emerging implications with as much clarity and balance as possible. But that's as far as it goes. After that, the onus is on the voter to inform their personal convictions with the extra information published in the last few weeks.
The head-shaking sighs in response to yesterday's contribution from the masters of the maternity hospitals, bemoaning their collective confusion, imply that the public has neither the responsibility nor competence to cope with anything other than one-liners, snappy slogans and inescapable, unambiguous truths.
When we elevate monochrome simplicity beyond its status, we also promote communications tools beyond their proper status.
This is not a contest between posters. This is a moral dilemma of complexity and challenge - and the Irish public can handle it without let-out clauses or sympathy votes.
Terry Prone is a director of Carr Communications in Dublin
Mary Holland is on leave