Taoiseach's finest hour is tarnished

As every fan of Star Trek knows, when you're heading for an asteroid belt, you reverse engines at warp speed. Irish politics are far more implausible than Star Trek, but the same principle applies.

Over the last five years, the starship Private Enterprise has been exploring hitherto unimagined realms of prosperity and possibility under the guidance of Capt Ahern, first mate Harney and chief engineer McCreevy. Now, however, the asteroids are peppering the bridge.

The tried and trusted evasive manoeuvre is to move backwards at the speed of light. Any moment now, we should reach the 1950s.

It is tempting to see what is happening in the Republic now as a brilliant conspiracy. How do you deal with the problem of a young population with high expectations meeting hard times in a rapidly slowing economy? The old solution was simple - emigration.

How could we get them to leave, though? Hmm . . . what about parading a few dead patriots through the streets? And then let's spend the next few months on a patently pointless abortion referendum? As an added bonus, the demand for flights out of the country will ease the problems at Aer Lingus.

Attractive as this conspiracy theory is, it probably gives too much credit to the Government. The impulse at work is much more likely to be blind panic. The big project of the last few years - never mind public services, smell the money - is in trouble.

As the harsh winds begin to blow, the public looks to the State for shelter and finds a shambles. Coming up with a plan to save the health service after five years is deeply unconvincing and anyway Charlie McCreevy doesn't have the money.

Instinctively, perhaps even sub-consciously, the Government opts for nostalgia. It is trying to recreate the days when political legitimacy could be borrowed from two sources of mythic power: the militarist cult of armed struggle inherited from the old IRA and the aura of holiness derived from the Catholic nature of the State.

Next Sunday's extraordinary pageant plugs into the first, the abortion referendum into the second.

The last thing the abortion referendum is about is abortion. The two elements of the package announced last week that will actually mean anything - the establishment of an agency to prevent crisis pregnancies and the introduction of legal protection for current medical practice - do not require a referendum.

The explicit appeal of all the rest is that it will do nothing. It will not stop at least 6,000 Irish women having abortions in Britain every year. It will not interfere with the agencies which help them to do so. It will not limit the availability of the morning-after pill or the IUD.

It is, in other words, purely symbolic. It would hardly matter at all, indeed, except that the symbolism is directly sectarian.

What we are being asked to do is simply to re-sectarianise the Constitution by endorsing a use of language that means absolutely nothing outside the context of a very specifically Catholic theology.

The whole strategy rests on pure semantics. Since words mean what we want them to mean, we can simply define abortion in such a way that it acquires the proper Catholic meaning. Here is our old friend, "double effect" - the notion that an abortion is not an abortion if it is carried out to save the life of a pregnant woman.

Even a supporter of the amendment, gynaecologist Peter McKenna, conceded in The Irish Times on Saturday that this is "torturing the language in order to appease our religious heritage".

As he told the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, there is no basis in medical practice for the distinction that is to be written into our law.

"I think that you are better to be up front and clean about this and say that the pregnancy is being aborted. That is the treatment. It's not that it is a side effect of the treatment, it's not that it's an unintentional side effect of the treatment. The treatment is you end the pregnancy. That is I think abortion."

Doctors, of course, can live with the torturing of language if it allows them to protect their patients. What should concern the rest of us, though, is that the only reason for this semantic hypocrisy is that it fits in with an increasingly discredited aspect of Catholic tradition.

In the times that are in it, it might be worth remembering that this doctrine itself is rooted in a reflection not on abortion but on the practice of war.

The original point of the double-effect doctrine was that it was okay to inflict civilian casualties in a just war.

Most thoughtful Catholics would now repudiate this idea, as indeed the Maynooth professor of moral theology Patrick Hannon did in a recent Irish Times interview with Vincent Browne.

In the long term, the real political loser in all of this is Bertie Ahern. His one great achievement is the negotiation of the Belfast Agreement with its promise of a "truly historic opportunity for a new beginning".

The opportunity for a pluralist non-sectarian Ireland is being squandered, not just in north Belfast and at Stormont, but also in Merrion Street.

By parading the undead and making capital from the unborn, the Taoiseach is tarnishing his own finest hour.

fotoole@irish-times.ie