There was no concern for Savita, just usual self-satisfied public ire

IT is hardly credible that the hue and cry in the aftermath of the Savita Halappanavar tragedy was to legislate for the X case.

The links between Halappanavar’s death and the X case were negligible. Proposing action on one as the answer to the other was perverse. A rereading of much of what passed for debate in the days and weeks after Savita’s — probably avoidable — death is a study in the self-satisfaction some glean from screaming blue murder. It is not just the stupidity and incoherence, which characterises all anger, that stands out so clearly now. It is the feral nature of the crowd, which, for more than 30 years, has set the tone, so disastrously, and with such ill-consequence, for Irish women.

One woman suffering those consequences is a young immigrant, who told her doctors that she became pregnant after rape. She was forced to give birth by caesarean section to a child she did not want to carry. The €1,500 cost of travelling to Britain for an abortion was beyond her. She has little English and no money. This has not happened in a mother-and-baby home in the 1920s. There were no nuns involved. It is Ireland, 2014.