History will coolly record the facts as these: the final result of the referendum in the Republic of Ireland last Friday, 25 May, was that the electorate voted by 66.4% to 33.6% to repeal their Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, the clause which since 1983 has established in law the equal right to life of a mother and her unborn child. This result will, it seems, leave the way clear for Irish law to permit abortion for any reason during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.
Some shocks, however well anticipated, can never quite be braced for. I knew that Ireland has hastened into secularism in recent decades; I knew that the mainstream media and popular feeling there was opposed to the crisis-stricken Catholic Church as an institution; I knew that Ireland’s Eighth Amendment was an obvious target for the international pro-choice movement. Even so, for Ireland — Ireland! — to vote so decisively in favour of an idea so directly contrary to its past and character, to move so freely and willingly against the moral universe that made her what she is, takes some moments to sink in. Behind Friday’s result is also a second slower, deeper horror in the emergence of a new Ireland, an Ireland willing to conform to its neighbours in a way that is wholly unprecedented and utterly out of character. When before has Ireland ever jettisoned the values of its ancestors for the sake of popular opinion, for the sake of membership of a gang of more fashionably-minded nations? (Precisely because Britain is a ring-leader of this gang, there are no grounds for self-satisfaction this side of the Irish Sea, either). At Mass in my South London parish yesterday, listening to all the Irish names among the anniversary prayers for the deceased — the Murphys, the Collinses, the Kavanaghs — I wondered what they might have made of it, and sensed a great void, a great sliding into the sea of a cliff that, not long ago, had seemed unassailable crystalline granite. The writer Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh says simply that
‘It is the most shameful day in Irish history’. Indeed it is a defeat for the pro-life movement, a defeat for the Catholic Church, and a defeat for humanity. I believe the referendum will come to be greatly regretted, and possibly sooner than many think.
We who have an eternal hope can look squarely at this defeat, however. Yes, it is a very hard defeat. We may see, as we look, the media’s slick tango to success, the bowed, wounded Church, many of its wounds its own work, and, in every Irish county but one, the triumph of individualism. And yet the clearer and less flinching our eye, the better we see the vindication of the pro-life position, even in its defeat. We see the fakeness and the joylessness in the very climax of the Repealers’ celebrations, the hollowness of the triumph even in its freshness. What next? Where next? they seem to be asking. We perceive in the shallowness of the slogans the barrenness that lurks behind the worship of the self and the will. And in the very flimsiness of much of the argumentation, even as it carries the day, there comes to mind the one thing that the false and the shallow cannot resist, defy it as it might: the attrition of truth’s alliance with time.
Now, that has described a certain kind of pro-choice position, that of those most politically engaged. I do not know how reluctantly or under what pressure some ‘Yes’ (‘Repeal’) voters will have cast their vote, and I am aware that I am observing the affair from a different country. There are in Ireland, as in Britain, a great many people of ordinary good will who are simply not sure what they think about this issue, knowing only that it is very sensitive: their ‘Yes, Repeal’ votes will not have been born of firm principle. Although the fundamental question is whether the life of the child in the womb is a human life, I think many people are reluctant to entertain the idea, out of fear, or guilt, perhaps. They may, however, have been moved by the hard cases that must necessarily be examined when discussing abortion, and in voting ‘Yes’ done what they believed to be compassionate. They may have remained impervious to the alternative vision of humanity offered by the ‘No’ side because it was nearly drowned out, or simply lost faith in the old Ireland and felt willing to throw in their lot with the new. The temptation to treat this vote as another referendum on the Catholic Church will have been more or less irresistible, I should think. The question might as well have been phrased ‘Do you want to give the Church another kicking?’. Of course many people will have answered ‘Yes’. Yet it is that first question, that of the humanity of the child in the womb, which is the more momentous. It will not go away, and eventually we will be able to avoid it no longer.
I think, also, that this victory seems a little too obvious, a little too complete, much as the Crucifixion was a little too obvious and complete. This bull’s-eye victory must mark nearly the zenith of the pro-choice movement, I think. Having reached the zenith, the movement will then have to hold onto its position, and this is where all destructive revolutions begin to founder. When secular paganescent progressivism has had its day, as it will have done sooner or later, what then? Well, this is uncertain. If referendums could produce pro-life results in 1983 and 1992, then this result is not least a sign not simply that people are for abortion, but that their moral positions are fickle and easily changed, perhaps because the idea of absolute moral principles has been so weakened. At the moment Ireland, like a teenager in a tantrum, feels that it cannot throw off its Catholic heritage quickly enough, ashamed that it lasted so long. Yet when this is over and all we are left with are the crises that readily-available abortion will produce — inconsolable unhappiness, spiritual and mental anguish, emptinesses and silences that children and the young should have filled — people of good will shall begin to ask questions. They will need, instead of adolescent revolution, more solid fare: a serious discussion of the nature of humanity, the dignity of human life and our proper response to crisis pregnancies. Whatever their religious position, they will return to the natural law. They will hunger for a new vision that transcends the tired, inward-looking individualism of the 2010s. Even at this moment, when the spirit of our time lent such a fair wind to the ‘Yes’ side, still a third of voters remained unconvinced. If the New Evangelisation keeps lit the lights that it should, it will be able to step into the breach and speak, as once St. Patrick did, of the radical and irreducible nature of human dignity, of the strange commandment of love.
In the meantime, though, Irish or not, we must bear the consequences of Friday’s decision and do what we can on the ground to ease the profound damage and pain that it will cause.
