This debate is 34 years in coming and it could drag us back to the bad old days

WHAT a progressive few years it has been… from the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act to the popular endorsement of Marriage Equality and the recognition of transgender rights to altered birth certs. And we’ve also, don’t forget, welcomed our first gay Taoiseach without a single murmur, only for a marvelling foreign media – who must still see this country as a land of potatoes and priests – to further point out what we hadn’t noticed, namely that he’s a man of mixed race. The pace of change of recent years has been at the speed of light, compared to the glacial centuries that went before. We’ve even had a lesbian Rose of Tralee, triumphantly subverting the whole ‘Fr Ted’ image of that pageant as a cringeworthy Lovely Girls contest. This silent social revolution has been a wonder to behold… and the dismantling of the direct-provision system, whose petrified nature was starting to cause alarm, may yet promise some fresh cultural transformations and more reasons to celebrate. But now comes, again, the most difficult social issue of all, abortion. It will test just how ‘progressive’ the Irish people really are in 2018. Will the new nation be able to resist the appalling mudslinging that marked this same clash of convictions one third of a century ago? Or will the language leading up to the May referendum be loaded in a passive-aggressive way as we subtly try to label each other? Added into the mix this time, and which was absent from the bitter 1983 campaign to insert the ‘Pro-Life Amendment’ into our bedrock law, is the phenomenon of social media. It has hardly been a velvet cradle of respectful politeness thus far. Perhaps people will indeed be mindful of each other and models of composure… but many see this topic as a blue touchpaper issue, and one likely to test our tolerance (and self-congratulation) to the limit. It seems safe to predict that many friendships will be sundered by the stances people take on Facebook and elsewhere, as close acquaintances are suddenly horrified by the stances of some of their peers. There is also the temptation of ‘virtue-signalling’ whereby people play ostentatiously to what they see as their own follower base, and which can easily stray into offensiveness. Large numbers in the United States, polarised between Republicans and Democrats, seem to have fallen into this trap of corrosive us-andthem antagonism.

So there will be bad blood in cyberspace. And raised voices in pubs and around family dinner tables are in prospect too, although cooler heads will seek to hush and quieten. The subject also seems bound to crop up at Christmas parties, despite the seasonal tradition of truce. We like a good argument, after all, but this one is freighted with sensitive feelings.

IN some cases, the divisions are likely to leave the divisions between Leavers and Remainers in Britain looking like a quarrel over the correct rules of croquet. But perhaps civility will prevail.

This showdown between the forces of ‘Liberalism’ and ‘Conservatism’ (labels again) has been brewing for more than a third of a century, but especially since the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act in 2012, which traditionalists naturally branded a misnomer.

That legislation was a response by Enda Kenny to the horror death in Galway of Savita Halappanavar, who had asked for a termination in the throes of undiagnosed sepsis, but who was told she could not have one while there was a foetal heartbeat. The case led to many denunciatory editorials abroad.

Sometimes there is a step backwards before two steps forward. In recent years, the advances on the social agenda have been rapid by any yardstick. The question is whether circumstances are now sufficient to reverse the 66.9% to 33.1% support that inserted the Eighth Amendment in the first place.

Alongside a proposal to repeal will be published draft legislation on what is supposed to be enacted. And over-reach here could prove politically fatal, potentially leading to a welter of recriminations.

A century after 1916, Ireland is indeed changed – and changed utterly, but as Yeats could never have foreseen. Less than two decades into this new evolution, what comes next is a terrible battle over the unborn. And the fewer casualties the better.