Brian Cowen will be wasting his time and ours - and setting everyone at each other's throats - if he goes ahead with the programme he has proposed to get around the problem of abortion.
Does it really take a Green Paper and a round of consultation, discussions in Cabinet, the drafting of legislation and a Dail debate, followed by another fevered referendum, to tell us how divided we are and how intractable the issue?
Hardly.
In the end, as we light up for the Millennium, we'll be told that the issue is far too important for the Dail to resolve. So it's back to the people, with a question set to suit William Binchy, Patricia Casey and their allies.
It will be set to suit them because most members of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, a few in Labour and some in the Progressive Democrats accept our version of Lyndon Johnson's line: if you have them by the fundamentals, their hearts and minds will follow.
The Green Paper will tell us that doctors differ, whatever the discipline: theology, medicine or law.
Some find it difficult to separate one from the other.
In 1983, an avuncular bishop explained to a gathering of nurses in Donegal that life begins "when the daddy egg meets the mammy egg."
Those engaged in medicine and law blame the politicians who've failed to pass definitive legislation since 1983. Because of that, they say, it's almost impossible for them to make informed decisions, though medical doctors can always refer to the Medical Council over which Patricia Casey presides.
And what has changed since 1983 when differences, not even on abortion but on the form of a constitutional ban, spread to every corner of the country and to people at all levels of our many-layered, not to mention class-ridden, society?
For those who don't remember - and even for those who do but would prefer to forget - here's a small reminder. The issue, remember, was the wording; but it was enough to divide the country.
There were farmers for and against it; teachers, too; doctors, gynaecologists and other specialists who couldn't find common ground; trade unionists for and against; lawyers who argued as if they meant it . . .
Politicians kept a wary eye on the Catholic bishops, and the bishops nervously eyed those who'd led them into the campaign.
The atmosphere was poisonous. Jim Kemmy, one of the bravest and least bitter people in politics, remembered to the end of his life how he'd heard a child outside the Mechanics Institute in Limerick ask her mother: "Is that the man that kills the babies?"
I doubt if an improved atmosphere will be among the changes this time round. If anything, the debate will be more combative, the struggle more intense.
Much more is at stake.
As the power and influence of institutional Catholicism declines, fundamentalism spreads and its grip on what used to be areas of clerical control grows tighter.
The bishops and their conservative supporters have been undermined by scandals and demoralised by shrinking congregations. They are now soft targets for populist critics who are reluctant to take on edgy fundamentalists and their allies of the new right.
The new line-up is well to the right of the Hierarchy. In the UK, for instance, the director of SPUC, Phyllis Bowman, lately accused the bishops of "delaying by at least five years the day when parliament will legislate to stop abortions."
This was because she thought their pre-election statement on social policy, The Common Good, favoured Labour. Never mind the common good, as the old fogeys in the hierarchy saw it; in her view it helped elect "a parliament dominated by pro-abortionists."
It's strange to think of the bishops and the left as the common enemy of both political and religious fundamentalism, from Margaret Thatcher to Patricia Casey. On the other hand, if the fundamentalists find themselves in strange company or making what sound like contradictory cases, well, the end always justifies the means.
The current issue of the American Spectator manages to blame the left and warn us of the perils of prosperity at the same time. Mary Robinson, it says, "set as her priorities the introduction of divorce, contraception and abortion - all of them illegal at the time, and all of them legalised under her presidency.
"This type of do-it-yourself regime is, of course, easier to carry on in prosperous times, and to one who has been away from Ireland for longer than a decade, the prosperity is positively alarming."
The piece quotes two writers with approval: Mary Kenny and the editor of the Irish Catholic, David Quinn. He complains about how difficult it is to get a Catholic word in edgeways these days, not, as in a recent Sunday Times column, about the left's threat to prosperity.
Nothing, however, looks like stopping our backward march to 1983. Then as now there was little doubt on two points. The first was that, wherever you looked, there were citizens who disagreed with their colleagues, near-neighbours, friends and relations.
The second was that, while everyone looked the other way, one in 10 pregnancies in this State ended in abortion. Not within the State, of course, but in the United Kingdom.
Attitudes to abortion ensure that our most reliable figures are still estimates. But the most widely accepted estimate is that about 5,000 women a year travel to the UK to terminate their pregnancies.
Around 75,000 have gone since 1982; some 150,000 since the law in England changed 30 years ago.
But are those who disagreed with each other in 1983 and 1992 likely to change their minds if and when the Government follows its chosen course and puts the question, whether in 1997, 1998 or in the next millennium?
The answer is: No.
And is it likely that when this affair has run its course, the sad procession to London or Liverpool will stop? Far from it. But those who suffer most will be among those who can't join the procession - the women trapped by poverty or some other circumstance in this jurisdiction.
There is a clear and probably increasing need for abortion in this State; and there is no hope of agreement as to how, if ever, and in what circumstance, the service should be provided. There is no hope of agreement because the fundamentalists, true to form, refuse to engage in dialogue.
Irish pregnancies will continue to be terminated in the United Kingdom because it suits them to pretend that we don't have abortion here. They believe in absolutes, but on their own terms:
Patricia Casey explained on Questions and Answers the other night that there were variations of zero tolerance.
There are variations on abortion, too: it depends on whether they're carried out here or elsewhere. It is a strange kind of morality; one that appears to be governed by geography.