The
vote on the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Bill is a big moment for many. For me, it's a new low in our public discourse and our body politic. It’s an honest
opinion, so if you like it, fine, if not, that’s your fine too. I respect your opinions
irrespective of what it is, so please respect mine:
A civilised society should have debates, where argue your case, weigh up the merits of all opinions, make a decision and then go home. It’s not bad thing to be pro-choice. It’s also not a bad
thing to be deeply uncomfortable with abortion and decide you’re against it.
Both sides have valid arguments. If
the last nine months are anything to go by though, we are anything but civilised, let
alone a society. The people, who suffer, meanwhile, are manifold. Here are a
number of things more pressing than the current grotesque show on display this
morning in Dail Eireann, and what I
believe the debate around abortion has revealed so far.
According to the CSO, 87,100 people left Ireland in 2011, of
which 91% were under the age of 25. You can extrapolate from the total sum, which
have emigrated since the economy imploded in 2007 and 2008. The country is in
penury and every working person, public and private sector, has been put to the
rack, vilified for earning a living or blackmailed into accepting ever poorer
working conditions. Sure, what else can you do – there’s nothing else out
there. It’s an easy lie to believe, and we do, and are scared to believe
otherwise. We're victims, we have no choice. Sure, no one would believe us
anyway.
Yet we wonder when the banking crisis, which is the cause of
our travails, will finally elicit visible outrage. The tragic fact is that it
may not, whether through snobbery (if you see a Republican Sinn Fein flag at a
protest, many would be turned off joining it – but short sighted product
placement is what they love to do, our political groups, though I never recall seeing
a pic of Jim Larkin holding a Dr Pepper at a street protest) or through
fatalistic apathy. The case has not been convincingly made for outrage. If it
had, the streets would be full. Those who want it otherwise must try harder to
convince people who are jaded and worried in a real and day-to-day way.
After five years, a banking enquiry has not met – or rather,
no investigation has taken place that has been either the impetus for justice
in the face of our ruin or the template for a reformed banking system that will
serve the needs of our society. The tittle-tattle of the Anglo tapes has simply
shown what we already knew about Drumm and Co. and the ineptitude of the
authorities to front up on big promises to get to the bottom of what happened
in our banking system.
Childcare is nearly totally unregulated and it costs more to
send your child to a crèche than to the poshest of private schools. Not once
has this been addressed, neither the cost of provision nor the quality of worker in this
area. This was supposedly an election issue as far back as 2002 and yet still
lingers unpleasantly. Parents, who might otherwise choose a different life,
have been penalised for having children at all, who by the way, will be paying
off our mess. A sector of our economy and our society exists, where working with
children is below working in a supermarket on the economic and social food
chain, despite the onerous responsibility those working in the sector face and
the importance a good, well trained childcare worker has for the wellbeing of
our children.
Our children are forced through a dysfunctional education
system that is top heavy not only on religion, but an industry-led agenda that treats the
formation of young minds, one of the greatest tasks of mankind, into the
creation of unthinking worker bees; stymies creativity and curiosity, eschews
intellectual rigour or active citizenship – education, where every little helps,
and education helps very little to stop our economic and social rot. The economic consequences are clear for this,
far more damaging, however, is the thinness of our intellectual fabric. So much
for reaping the benefits of the good years.
We can’t get 4000 homeless off our streets; we can’t stamp
out the drugs epidemic destroying not only urban but also rural communities,
where the plays of future John B Keanes will be reworked via the horrors of an Irvine
Welsh novel. Yet we can afford a debate about abortion.
This is the Ireland of 2013. These are pressing issues. Faced
with such pressure, who can blame people ill -equipped and unqualified to take
on these challenges but to retreat into fantasy.
Abortion is still a hot-button topic, thanks to a tragic
accident, the cause of which is likely a failure of procedure, by extension a
failure of leadership. The ensuing discussion has long since diverged from an initial
question of adequate care and clear guidelines for medical professionals to one
which neither resolves those questions nor will resolve the real, intractable ethical
questions around abortion.
Meanwhile, Ireland festers unnecessarily in the sunshine.
To each person animated by the abortion debate I ask you
this: if you really care about life, on either side of the debate, why aren’t
you putting your anger and passion into something a damn sight more important
than a row about the very existence of abortion in this country?
Accept that people’s circumstances are not always black and white – not every
woman has a choice and not every abortion is about exercising a choice like a
consumer. It's time to find a common ground. Every
woman who has experienced the tragedy of miscarriage, of complications in
pregnancy, or rape, or incest or even dumb luck has their plight cheapened by
an insulting knockabout that should have been resolved a generation ago. For
that, we can thank our public representatives, elected and unelected. This debate
that would have been resolved when I was in my early teens had it not been for
the near criminal negligence, laziness and procrastination of politicians who
were so ignorant, they thought the X-Case was a sci-fi cop show.
To every one of the 166 paid gobshites in Dail Eireann on either side of the
debate on abortion, to every activist who’d rather spend their days outside a
dead toff’s former 18th century shag pad-turned doss house for the
culturally inbred and intellectually disadvantaged, I ask you this: why can’t
you have a simple, civilised conversation with each other about the provision
of health care that doesn’t include emotive language, crude stereotyping of the
other side and their arguments, that doesn’t reduce the death of an unborn
child or of a young woman into a pantomime that insults not only the dead but
also the living.
We would be deserving of better, if we didn’t seem to accept
it so readily.
@gutenmorgan
