The referendum is a battle for the soul of Ireland rather than a fight against abortion, argues Conor Gearty
It is not fully appreciated quite how morally empty are those who would argue that it is necessary to vote Yes in order to protect the lives of Ireland's unborn children. Of course we know that the country is not awash at present with abortion clinics murdering Irish (unborn) citizens. There being nothing to close down, therefore, the referendum will produce no change.
By the same token, it is clear that a vote against is hardly likely to turn Ireland into a child-killing society, despite arguments to the contrary from the usual scare-mongering sources, for whom the rhetoric of terror has worked so well in the past.
The moral scandal is in what those who would vote Yes because of their commitment to the "life" of the unborn would seem nevertheless to be willing to continue to allow: the flow of abortion-related information within the State; the huge traffic in women to Britain to have their "children" killed; and, perhaps worst of all, now to be allowed within the State, the sacrifice of the thousands of unborn children who happen not yet to have implanted themselves in the womb - what a technical point to concede in the face of mass murder!
The Yes campaigners have sacrificed their purity for a grubby political deal. If they were focusing their energy and their litigious resources on campaigning in Britain to stop the carnage, picketing the ports and trapping pregnant women within the confines of the Irish State, they would deserve respect even from their opponents.
As it is, by their own admission they are obsessed with a mere whimsy of jurisdiction, like Polish nationalists opposing the Holocaust because of where it was happening rather than because of the murder that it entailed.
Having entered the seedy world of politics, these erstwhile pro-life purists now naturally find that the Taoiseach is their best friend. What a coup for that master-politician to have dragged these ideologues down to his own level, into the gutter of aimless pragmatism where all that matters is power, or at least those provincial bits of it left over after the EU, the multinationals and Ireland's other true chiefs have seized their share.
The hope is that the abortion boil has been lanced in time for the next election; this is the only kind of consideration about which Mr Ahern is genuinely exercised. For its part, the church hierarchy seems to be viewing its fanatical ground troops with the kind of awed respect a vulture shows to a savage pack of hounds while waiting its chance safely to chew over the remains of some downed victim.
In this case the carcass will be Irish pluralism. This referendum is not genuinely about abortion at all. Rather it is about the soul of the nation, a battle fought to a standstill in the 1980s but being revived now that the pace of material excess has slowed, leaving space for moral fervour.
What lies next on the agenda if this empty Yes vote is secured? All embryo research of course is a non-starter, particularly because, as with abortion, our purity will cost us nothing, there being plenty of "Godless" nations willing to do the work. But then divorce, maybe, and of course the "lacuna" in the law which permits the IUD and the morning-after pill will need another referendum to "bring consistency to our protection of the unborn".
And then, if they can get away with it, an attack on travel and information rights, perhaps even a withdrawal from various European organisations to guarantee such initiatives from attack. If this is the true agenda, the pro-life groups have not in fact sacrificed their ideals, merely suppressed them temporarily in order to fool the people. So are they now soulless political opportunists or do they remain fanatical ideologues at heart?
If pluralism will be one victim of a Yes vote, the integrity of Ireland's political and legal system will be another. What is the point of elected representatives if their job is to obey blindly the demands of the electorate in a referendum campaign carried on as vacuously and as misleadingly as this one?
The theoretical beauty behind the idea of having elected representatives is that their brains and judgment can be interposed between the passing passions of the people and a code of laws that must then be properly enforced. But if Ireland's deputies and senators are to be a slot machine dispensing the people's laws, why bother with elections, with people even - mannequins would surely be cheaper, less corrupt and more efficient.
The law is even more damaged by this hybrid constitut-ional/legislative amendment. If the Yes campaign could not make even a few lines do the work they wanted back in 1983, how can they be so sure that the complicated trickery they have come up with this time will do exactly what they want? Perhaps their next initiative will be a referendum to pass the selection of the senior judiciary over to Cardinal Connell.
Having cut the executive and the legislative branches from the process of law making, it seems a reckless folly for them to continue to permit potentially "unsound" judges to adjudicate on what their words mean: is it not obvious that they mean merely what they want them to mean?
The Yes campaign presents itself as a Christian and a human rights movement. Perhaps it is the former, though it would be an interesting exercise, to guess whose side Jesus Christ would be on. It is certainly not the latter.
The whole rationale of human rights is to respect the dignity of the person, to balance rights in the best way possible, and in every situation no matter how difficult to strive for an outcome that best reflects the worth of all. In its contemporary form this demands that we see the mother as well as child, the woman as well as foetus. This simple insight is the result of years of struggle against the forces of moral certainty that, in another part of the world and a different culture, are now indelibly associated with the once-innocent Islamic concept of Taliban.
Conor Gearty is Professor of Human Rights Law at King's College, London