Protect mothers by rewriting the Constitution and turning the tide

I HAVE fallen in love with my children and my grandchildren all over again in the last fortnight. Of course, they’ve always meant the world to me, but, suddenly — I’m talking about the grandchildren — they’re personalities in their own right.

And what personalities: A six-year-old boy, full of excitement and potential, inventing games all the time and constantly challenging the older folk to keep up with him;a three-year-old girl, a genuine princess who can wrap you around her little finger; a 15-month-old, intrepid little boy, ready for any adventure, without a fear in the world.

For two weeks on Sherkin Island, as removed as we wanted to be from the cares of the world, I rediscovered, through their eyes, what it’s like to be a child. And through the eyes of my daughters, who are all grown-up now, but who all fell in love with the ruggedness and the beauty of an island where growing up must have been tough in the old days, but which could hardly be more idyllic in an Irish August.

There was one day, in particular, on Silver Strand (yes, it is a really silvery strand), where the waves were high enough to knock you over, but not too high to threaten the weaker swimmers amongst us (you’re looking at him). We spent hours in the water, and each of us was a child again. It’s a unique feeling.

There’s never a time when you’re not prepared to do whatever it takes for your children, and for your grandchildren. But it’s not something you think about very often. After all, all your children face their own challenges in life. You usually find out about their problems after they’ve solved them themselves.

And when they become adults, their own, natural independence asserts itself anyway. The only hope you have is that years of trial-and-error parenting have helped them to make decent choices at the different crossroads in their lives. The only other thing you can really do is to always be there, if you’re needed.

But Silver Strand was a day when the years fell away. Years and years ago, we used to spend as much of the summer as we could, with our children, on the beach at Rosscarbery in West Cork, challenging the biggest waves we could find, eating crisps and hobnob biscuits that always had grains of sand in them. That day, on Silver Strand, it felt like we were back there again.

It’s why I found myself wondering, that night, “what would I do, what sacrifice would I be prepared to make, if my daughters, and now my three grandchildren, needed it?” I think — I hope — the answer is that no sacrifice would be too great.

And then I read about a woman — maybe still a child herself, that’s not entirely clear — who is raped in her own country, who discovers she is pregnant after she comes to Ireland, and who needs all the help we can give her. Desperate for help, unable to cope, she becomes suicidal and ends up on hunger strike.

That’s a very bald sentence, isn’t it. It’s bald, because it’s impossible to convey the agony of a young person in that situation. But that agony would be all too real to her and to those who love her. I think I know how the vast majority of parents would react to that agony, irrespective of their religious beliefs. They would help their daughter to implement her choice, whatever it might be.

But we (the Irish State) take her to court, to ask a judge to allow her to be force-fed. In some of the reports I’ve read, it has been suggested that there were a lot of lawyers in that court, representing the state and the HSE. One report even suggested that there were lawyers, appointed by the court, to represent the unborn baby. Nobody has reported who spoke up on behalf of the young woman whose pain was being debated.

The Guardian newspaper has described our law, enacted amidst much controversy last year, as “surely one of the most absurd and morally compromising pieces of state hypocrisy in Europe”. In one sense, that’s unfair. When the bill was going through the Oireachtas, I described it as the least that had to be done, and the most that could be done, under the terms of our Constitution, as it stands. But one government minister, Kathleen Lynch, said the day the bill became law that we would have to revisit this situation again.

And we will. We cannot allow young women to go to the brink of death, before we are prepared to give them the help they need. We cannot continue to force victims of rape or incest, or the mothers of babies who have no chance of life outside the womb, to buy a Ryanair ticket and an English abortion, and content ourselves that we have solved the problem.

I know how painful an issue this is — I’ve always been conflicted about it myself. But the question we have to ask ourselves is: “What if this was my child?” The thought that any young person could be treated to a bureaucratic nightmare, as a result of being raped, is unbearable, utterly unacceptable. In that sense, what we have created is not just absurd, but cruel. It is a double attack on the person who has already been abused.

I don’t know the answer. I suspect a lot of us in Ireland don’t know the answer. I often find myself wishing that I had the moral certainty of some of the activists on both sides of this debate, but I don’t. The one thing I am absolutely certain of is that a woman in pain, or fear or distress, needs support, not further victimisation. And the systems we have put in place are the opposite of what women need.

For years, in Ireland, we debated the equally contentious issue of divorce. Again and again, we were warned that any weakening of the constitutional ban on divorce would “open the floodgates” to a system that would simply destroy the family.

Eventually, we came up with a solution — the circumstances in which divorce would be allowed, the way in which people could go about it, the provisions that would have to be made. It was all carefully written down, and put into the Constitution by the (narrow) will of the people.

It worked. Maybe not perfectly, but the floodgates never opened. If people were asked tomorrow to remove the current provisions and re-insert the ban that was there before, I’d be ready to bet that 90+% would vote to keep things as they are.

Every incident, every trauma, every tragedy that affects young women in our jurisdiction says the same thing.

We have to revisit the Eighth Amendment. We have to debate what we really want, write it down carefully, and put it in the Constitution in place of the meaningless and perverse language that’s there now. We have to do it by asking the same question: “What if it were my child?”

A young person treated to a bureaucratic nightmare as a result of rape is unbearable