Eilis O’Hanlon on the abortion debate,

The move towards a radical liberalisation of Irish abortion law was unsurprising, but the biggest challenge still lies ahead, writes Eilis O’Hanlon

PRO-CHOICE campaigners were originally unenthusiastic about the establishment of the Dail committee on repealing the Eighth Amendment. As far as they were concerned, the people had already spoken with one voice through the Citizens’ Assembly, and the job of the Oireachtas was now to enact that collective wisdom.

Why waste time with another talking shop? Tawdry delaying tactics, they suspected, occasioned by the fact that the Assembly had reached much more radical conclusions than expected.

Supporters of the committee demurred, arguing that hearings would allow elected representatives to bring all their political and intellectual acumen to bear on what question to best place before the Irish people in an abortion referendum next year.

Know what? The pro-choice lobby was right, though not because the committee was, as conspiracists feared, a ruse to water down the Assembly’s recommendations into a form more acceptable to timid conservative opinion.

Rather it was a waste of time because, months after its first formal session in September, the committee largely rubber-stamped the findings reached by the Citizens’ Assembly in just five weeks — not the best way to persuade sceptics that it approached its task with a clean slate and an open mind.

There were some minor differences. The Assembly recommended replacing or amending the Eighth Amendment. The committee’s gone for straight up repeal.

Members also decided only to recommend allowing abortion where an unborn child has a medical condition likely to result in death before or shortly after birth, whereas the Assembly wanted this option extended to babies with a “significant abnormality” that was not fatal. The committee also narrowly rejected the Assembly’s desire for socio-economic status to constitute grounds for abortion.

On all the main substantive issues, though, there’s barely a cigarette paper between them.

Principally that means backing unrestricted termination up until the 12th week of pregnancy, and later where there is a “real and substantial” risk to the life or health of the woman. All of which will, if passed by a referendum next year, constitute a significant liberalisation of Irish abortion law, and the pro-life lobby would probably be happy to fight a referendum campaign on this basis. The more that the wording of any referendum follows the recommendations of the Dail committee and Citizens’ Assembly, the more they’ll like it, as it widens the lines of attack.

Whether the Government decides to go for broke in this way remains to be seen, but it doesn’t have much time to make up its mind. If the Taoiseach is going to get his wish for a referendum in May, a referendum bill will have to be presented to the Dail before the end of January, or the beginning of February at the latest. (The answer depends on who you ask).

That’s hardly any time at all to agree the wording, and Christmas falls in between. The committee report will be published next week, and it will be New Year before the Fine Gael parliamentary party meets to discuss it. Work may be going on behind the scenes, but the timetable looks tight.

Committee chair, Senator Catherine Noone, told RTE’s Late Debate last week that she personally considered a May date for the referendum ambitious, and that June might be more achievable.

But she also indicated that she’d prefer alternative legislation on abortion to be published before the referendum, so that the people know what they’re voting for or against, rather than simply being given a Yes/No option on repealing the Eighth Amendment, then trusting the Government to do the right thing when giving shape to the result in practical terms.

The Health Minister and Attorney General are already fine-tuning this supplementary legislation, but it would be miraculous if that process did not get bogged down at some point. There are still a number of ambiguities as to how the “life or health” of the mother will be determined to be at risk. More than nine out of 10 abortions in the UK, for example, are carried out for vague “mental health” reasons. The issue of gestational limits on abortion also remains fuzzy.

Pro-choice campaigners could easily find themselves getting tangled up in these details if they’re unclear. To compare the debate around the Eighth Amendment to the Brexit talks, one might say that the process up to now has been rather like the first stage of those negotiations, with the hard bit still to come. The Government now has to see that through in a matter of weeks. Contrast that with the months spent on the far more modest Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act of 2013, which followed the tragic death from sepsis of Savita Halappanavar. Pro-life campaigners will seek to exploit any gaps in the legislation.

Pro-choice campaigners have had things pretty much their own way until now, and opinion polls still shine in their favour, but they’d do well to be wary. Hubris is an ever-present danger, and nemesis usually strikes anyone foolish enough not to heed the warnings.

Last week’s row over huge donations by foreign donors to the Repeal The Eighth campaign should cause concern. The Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) has ordered Amnesty International in Ireland to return one such donation of €137,000 to the New York-based Open Societies Foundations, on the grounds that it breaches rules in the 1997 Electoral Act banning all but token foreign donations for “electoral purposes”.

Amnesty Ireland chief Colm O’Gorman not only pledged to challenge the order, his assertion that the ruling “amounts to the targeting of organisations purely for their work on human rights and equality issues” and that “Amnesty International is completely independent of any political ideology” also revealed something troubling about the Repeal the Eighth movement’s inflated view of itself.

Those who support the liberalisation of Irish abortion law do not regard their position as political. They just think that they’re right, and that any decent person will think they’re right too. As such, they regard the statement “abortion should be available on demand” as morally self-evident, equivalent to “child abuse is wrong” and “slavery should be against the law”. And perhaps they’re right. Perhaps it is. But they need to prove that assertion under challenge, not simply expect their actions to be exempt from the same rules that govern everyone else.

That sense of entitlement was also on display throughout the committee hearings, where organisations which provide and campaign for abortion were treated as disinterested expert witnesses and permitted to give evidence, whilst, in my opinion, groups opposed to abortion appear to have been excluded because they were deemed to be politically biased.

Correcting this manifest bias would not have altered the outcome — abortion is a subject on which those on both extremes have long since made up their minds — but it could prove problematic if it becomes a theme during the referendum campaign itself.

Fighting as if the result is a foregone conclusion, so it doesn’t matter how much you deride the other side, is the mistake which Hillary Clinton made in the US Presidential election, when the campaign turned into a stand-off between liberal elites and those she saw as “deplorables”. Brexit was another instance when those despised as rednecks bit back hard.

They’d probably get away with it next year, because Ireland feels ready to vote for abortion, but why take the risk? Some humility will ultimately be worth much more to the campaign to repeal the Eight Amendment than any amount of money from foreign billionaires.

‘The pro-choice campaign’s had things pretty much its own way until now’