Money is the last issue in court battle

The decision by three student unions to call a halt to the long-running legal battle with SPUC over abortion information marks the official burial of one of student politics' hottest potatoes over the last decade.

Most of the current presidents of USI's constituent unions hadn't even sat their Inter Certs when USI, UCD and TCD students' unions crossed swords with the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) over the provision of abortion information in union handbooks.

As the executives of the three unions made the decision this month not to pursue SPUC to the European Court of Human Rights, there was a palpable sense of the abortion-information saga being the battle of another era, and something altogether foreign to the more pragmatic modern-day student politician.

Abortion information was the issue around which student politics polarised in the early 1990s and it dominated the agenda of many unions in those years. In the view of some observers, the perceived obsession of many national student politicians with the issue produced a backlash that has resulted in the present day Union of Students in Ireland and its constituent unions being dominated by distinctly centrist figures.

The three unions are now left wondering just how much they will have to pay in costs. If they do end up paying the full whack to their own legal team, and to SPUC (a total of about £220,000), the beneficiaries of this substantial amount of money make an interesting list. The solicitors for USI were Taylor Buchalter (as in Mervyn Taylor, former minister for Equality and Law Reform), while other lawyers who acted for the students include the former Attorney General, John Rodgers SC, and a certain former President of Ireland and present UN Commissioner for Human Rights.

While there's a certain amount of lawyerly horse-trading to be done between the two sides' legal teams, the students hope they won't end up paying anything like the full amount, especially to their own highprofile and politically sympathetic legal team.