Waiting for Pandora's box to open

A SMALL, slightly battered box sat on a table before the five judges in the Supreme Court last week, with "SPUC Exhibits for the Supreme Court" marked in pen on its side. The box was a little the worse for wear, buffeted by the 1992 referendum, tattered by the 1995 Abortion Information Bill, but it continued to do duty, a relic of the longest court battle in Irish student history.

SPUC v Grogan is the Jarndyce and Jarndyce of the student movement, a near Dickensian court action which has drawn generations of student leaders into its web for almost a decade.

It has its origins in the aftermath of the first abortion referendum, and reached a peak of sorts in 1992, when the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children obtained a permanent injunction preventing three students' unions - the Union of Students in Ireland and the unions in Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin - from printing abortion information in students' union guidebooks.

The Supreme Court will now decide on the continuance of that injunction and its decision will determine the direction of costs, estimated at about £400,000.

Privately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, elements of both sides in the case have made it clear that they would like to see the end of SPUC v Grogan.

Representatives of the three students' unions involved sat slightly uneasily together in the courtroom, like maritime survivors forced to share a lifeboat. Relations have been strained between TCD and USI in recent years, with the situation further complicated by internal divisions within USI and UCD.

Most officers in USI and UCD students' union want the case to end in the Supreme Court, whether the result is defeat or victory.

The women's rights officers and the welfare officers would prefer to continue the case in Europe in the event of defeat, a view shared by the cash strapped TCD students' union, which has the most to lose if the case goes against it.

For many in the anti abortion movement itself, the fight was lost in 1992 following the referendum and the Supreme Court's endorsement of the Abortion Information Bill in 1995. SPUC v Grogan is one of the final skirmishes in a battle that is largely over in its familiar, legal form. "It's all lawyers' money now," as one prominent anti abortionist put it last week.

The five Supreme Court judges seemed anxious to keep the arguments on both sides as succinct as possible last week. At one point, Mr Justice Barrington even appeared to prompt John Rogers SC, acting for the students, in the direction of the 14th amendment to the Constitution and its possible application to the students' case.

"Are you not in danger of looking a gift horse in the mouth?" asked the judge. Rogers seemed to regard it more as the kind of horse which might keel over and die before it reached the first fence, preferring initially to stick to his point that the original injunction was not right.

Shane Murphy, acting for SPUC, took the view that the Supreme Court should consider the law as it was at the time, although he did take the time to accuse the students of continuing to distribute abortion information despite the injunction.

John Rogers pleaded ignorance of any such action by the students, although the fateful promise of former USI president Karen Quinlivan at an earlier hearing on the case was alluded to a number of times in court: Quinlivan had promised that the unions would continue to distribute abortion information, regardless of any action the courts might take.

Occasionally in the course of last week's one day hearing, old faces from the early days of the case popped in to commemorate their own appearances in court for SPUC v Grngan. Former USI president Maxine Brady, the formidable ex president of TCD students' union, Ivana Bacik, and Jim Davis, TCD students' union's former ents officer, all paid brief visits during the day.

Their presence gave the proceedings a sense of continuity and, while Shane Murphy at one point described the students' actions through the years as "flamboyant", they also had a certain nobility. Until 1992, the original students involved faced prosecution and costs on an individual, not a representative, basis. Since then, the unions themselves have continued to fight the case, despite sometimes conflicting feelings on the issue at stake.

If costs go against the nions, TCD students' union faces possible closure and the other two unions face an enormous drain on their financial resources. In such an event the answer may lie with the Government, for whom the sight of students struggling under huge costs would be profoundly embarrassing.

As one former student leader put it, the issue is now as much a political one as a judicial one what will be done with those who fought to change Irish law and then found themselves frozen an injunction while Irish law changed around them? The Supreme Court has reserved judgment.