They named the unidentified baby boy John and buried him on the feast of the Epiphany - Nollaig na mBan. There were flowers and teddy bears and about a hundred people attended a funeral mass in Roscrea. We do not know if the infant's mother was among them. Despite assurances from the gardai that she would be treated with every consideration if she came forward, her identity remains unknown.
Her baby's body was found in a field close to a local authority housing estate on December 23rd. The State pathologist said the infant had lived for between 12 and 24 hours. As the local gardai commented, it was "particularly sad, coming up to Christmas". The mother of one of the children who found the body said the community was "very close knit, and our hearts go out to the mother".
You may have missed the story. The media seemed a little ill at ease about how to cover it, coming up to Christmas. It didn't quite fit in with the mood music of the millennium - community candles lit to mark the end of the old century and our new Ireland advancing, successful and serene, into the future.
It's more than 20 years since I first wrote about a case of this kind, in suitably indignant prose. A young woman living in a bedsitter in a salubrious Dublin suburb had given birth while crouched on the seat of a toilet.
According to the brief report in this newspaper, the impact of the baby's skull against the lavatory bowl caused a fracture which led to its death. The infant's body was found later, wrapped in a plastic bag.
I've thought of the young woman in the intervening years, offered a prayer from time to time that she was able to get over this terrible episode in her young life and find happiness. I had other reasons to remember the article. It was the first time that I dipped a toe into the murky waters of the debate on abortion. It was before the first constitutional referendum and there was almost no discussion of the issue, but I used this young woman's story to argue for some liberalising of the existing laws.
As a first step towards putting a human face on the issue, I suggested that Irish women who had had a pregnancy terminated in Britain, of whom even then there were quite a few, might sign a letter giving their reasons for wanting a change in the law.
It's a measure of how innocent I was that I genuinely expected a positive response. There wasn't so much as a single letter offering even theoretical support.
Instead, I was roundly abused on all sides, by anti-abortion groups for advocating murder and by liberal friends who said that what I was suggesting would amount to a grotesque invasion of privacy.
Now we are facing into a further stage in the national debate on abortion. At first sight it seems both sides to the argument want to see the discussion conducted in a civilised and tolerant fashion. Peter McKenna, the Master of the Rotunda Hospital, has once again said that pregnancies are terminated in Ireland in rare cases where the mother's life is at risk. Prof William Binchy, legal adviser to the Pro-Life Campaign, has confirmed that such medical intervention is acceptable where there is a serious risk to the life of the mother and, crucially, the procedure "is not directed towards taking the life of the child".
This represents a welcome development in the tone of the debate. But the rarity of such cases means that they are far removed from the experiences of the overwhelming majority of the 6,000 Irish women who travel to Britain annually to have pregnancies terminated.
Most of these, it seems safe to guess, are more concerned with the mixture of panic, fear, regret and other emotions involved in facing up to an unwanted pregnancy, and in trying to reach a decision about how to deal with it.
We rarely hear from Irish women with firsthand experience of abortion, although we do know that many of them are in their teens and that the termination is likely to take place at a relatively late stage in pregnancy.
This absence of Irish voices and faces was brought home forcibly by a television programme shown in the BBC community services slot earlier this week.
In it a number of young women spoke about their reasons for having had terminations and how they felt about the experience. Mostly these had to do with not being able to cope with raising a baby as a single mother, facing into university examinations, the attitudes of partners, parents and so on.
One woman said the single most constructive achievement of her young life had been the setting up of a loan fund at her university for students facing crisis pregnancies.
It is almost inconceivable that we will see such a programme on RTE during the upcoming abortion debate. No matter that these are the factors which determine most young women's decisions, the emotional argument remains heavily loaded on the side of those who say abortion is murder and that there are no grey areas.
This will only change when we can see for ourselves that human beings and their needs are infinitely more fallible and complex than such a simple statement allows. We have accepted this in other areas of personal morality because we know and can identify with the people involved.
It is not so long since marital breakdown and divorce were regarded as a moral catastrophe. Now we have a Taoiseach who is separated from his wife and living openly with a second partner. Anyone who suggested that Bertie and Celia should be regarded as being beyond the moral pale would be, quite rightly, laughed to scorn.
The same is true, perhaps even more dramatically, of our attitude to gays and lesbians. Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, when she was minister for justice, said a major factor in persuading her of the need for change in the laws was the collective voice of parents who said they could not stop loving their children because of their sexuality.
To her great credit, she saw the concrete human needs behind the political problem.
Surely it is not too much to hope that Brian Cowen will show the same humane vision when it comes to dealing with the issue of abortion?