No more room for ambiguity on values

A society less comfortable with moral ambiguities, convenient fictions or, as they are often called, Irish solutions to Irish problems, might be more uneasy about the gap between what we pretend to be and what we are.

The passionately held beliefs on either side of the Eighth Amendment debate are testimonies to this mismatch between a hoped-for Shangri-La and the hard-choices world we live in. The long-anticipated Supreme Court decision yesterday to formally strike down the ban on asylum seekers working in the State is another.