THE prevailing theory, after John O'Donoghue shared his views on abortion with Rodney Rice and the nation, was that he, did it with malice aforethought; his cunning plan being to bounce Fianna Fail into committing itself to having another referendum in the lifetime of the next Dail.
The received wisdom, after the event, was that Bertie Ahern should immediately remove him from the front bench, on the basis that to voice such a viewpoint without first checking with the party leader was a firing matter.
Relegating O'Donoghue to the back benches would show Bertie to be a man of action, would prevent the flowering of conservative viewpoints about abortion and would establish party solidarity. That, said the cognoscenti, was what Charlie would have done.
Not insignificant, this retrospective yearning for a punishing Big Daddy leader. The fact that so many members of Fianna Fail feel that leadership is best expressed through reducing free speech, enforcing uniformity of thought and decisively demoting mavericks, says a lot about the imprint left on the party by the style of one leader. There's a lingering learned helplessness that wants to be ordered about, and wants colleagues smacked when they step out of line.
I never believed for a moment that Bertie Ahern would kick John O'Donoghue to the back benches. Nor should he. What kind of narrow-minded leadership would take the biggest party in the State, spanning every demographic and social group, and impose a singular - even a personal - view-point on such a sensitive issue?
What kind of political immaturity would view as strong leadership the silencing of passionate personal viewpoints on an issue which has proved so divisive for more than two decades in so many other countries?
Fianna Fail has the same problems with this issue as every other party. There is a wide diversity of views in every party: Fianna Fail is the only one owning up to it. One of the things I find interesting about the response - particularly in media - to John O'Donoghue's comments was how rarely it related to the issue and how often it was positioned almost as a new episode in a soap opera.
TDs were getting phone calls seeking their views, not in order to take the debate on the issues any further, but to set them up for or against the man from Kerry, as if failure to goose-step to the same party line indicated something seriously wrong with them as individuals and with the party to which they belong.
What the episode really revealed is how very finite is our definition of pluralism.
In theory, we value diversity and pride ourselves on having shaken off the mind-controlling influences of the past. Yet it is seen as a breach of discipline and professionalism (or worse, as a comedy of errors) when a political party manifests precisely that diversity of thinking.
JOHN O'Donoghue has represented the opposite of my personal thinking on a range of issues. Yet in the course of the two years that he and I sat on the front bench, my liking and respect for him grew steadily. He has a mind and he speaks it. He has convictions and he lives for them. He has opinions and he voices them without running to the party leader to have them sanitised for party safety.
O'Donoghue's theatrical wordiness and intensity sometimes cause people who don't know him to underestimate him. To view him, if not quite as a right-wing figure of fun, neither as a serious intellect nor as ministerial material, is to do him an injustice.
Here is a witty, intelligent, serious-minded man who works hard and puts himself under a great deal of (sometimes unnecessary) pressure. If Fianna Fail is part of the post-election government, he should be a Minister, although Bertie Ahern might decide not to appoint his present spokespeople to the same positions in Cabinet, so O'Donoghue may not be Minister for Justice.
Whatever his ultimate fate, his current situation is not that of a smug conservative prima donna happy to have created controversy. "A most unlikely prima donna - and a most unhappy one," was his own description of himself this week.
The fact that he said his piece on a Saturday radio programme and that nothing hugely newsworthy happened in the ensuing 24 hours meant he had (unintentionally) set the agenda for the beginning of the week.
A naively-worded party statement compounded the problem, and it was another two days before Bertie Ahern put shape on the issue and calmed his troops, many of them scarified by the prospect of Youth Defence zealots camping on their front lawn during the coming election campaign.
If you live in middle-class suburban Dublin, it is difficult to understand the visceral fear evoked by a protest of absolutist anti-abortionists at the front door of a candidate's home outside Dublin. That fear is based on an appreciation of the real, if diminishing, political muscle such groups have outside Dublin and on a fear that their presence outside your front door will be taken by your constituents as indicating that you are pro-abortion.
If you are, by personal conviction, anti-abortion, there is a real pressure to prove it - and if enough TDs yield to that pressure, we will face another divisive referendum without any hope that it will serve us up the solution the hard-liners promise.
ALTHOUGH the public are as concerned as ever about abortion, they are not as easily polarised as they were five or 10 years ago: one major contributing factor to the diminishing political muscle of the fundamentalist groups.
However, the strategic sense of those groups is superb. They have targeted constituencies where an existing TD was under threat from a new candidate, and put the frighteners on one or the other, or both. They have identified constituencies with both liberal and conservative candidates, setting out to demonise the former and sanctify the latter during election campaigns.
Allowing abortion to figure in that kind of way will contribute neither to the development of a consensus nor to the already eroded respect for politicians.
Politicians are elected to bring their judgment to bear on emerging issues and legislate, not to cop out and hand big problems back to the public. This is precisely what is happening in relation to abortion. The public elected a legislature. That legislature has twice asked the public to indicate its views on abortion. In 1992, it was made quite clear to the electorate, in advance of the referendum vote, that a No vote on the substantive issue would mean legislation.
Following the result, the duty of the legislators was to legislate, based on what the nation had said. Since the men with key responsibility for discharging that duty, Ministers Brendan Howlin and Michael Noonan, have both found ways to duck their responsibility, and given that the cry is now going up for another referendum, the public could be forgiven, for wondering why they should bother voting for real live politicians in the general election at all.
Why not go with the flow, install instant referendum machines in every home, and do away with politicians altogether?