Publish and be damned

I wrote to the Irish Times about discrepancies in its reporting on the death of Savita Halappanavar; my letter's not been published, which is fair enough, so I thought I might as well post what I wrote, as I think it's probably worth giving a short and simple list of serious discrepancies:

Sir, 

Kitty Holland’s 24 November article,  ‘Are you okay… I think we are losing her’, seems to invite more questions than it answers about the tragic death of  Savita Halappanavar. 

Ms Holland says the hospital started Ms Halappanavar on antibiotics on Tuesday 23 October, but in an interview on the Irish Times website, Praveen Halappanavar tells Ms Holland that this happened on Sunday 21 October. 

Ms Holland says it was on Thursday 25 October that the hospital informed Mr Halappanavar that his wife had contracted e.coli ESBL, but in the website interview, Mr Halappanavar says he was told this on the morning of Friday 26 October. 

Ms Holland says that on Saturday 27 October the hospital considered putting Ms Halappanavar on dialysis, but in the website interview, Mr Halappanavar said that the hospital had already attempted this on Friday 26 October. 

RTE has published and broadcast a distinctly different timeline, purporting to come from Galway University Hospital, claiming that the hospital started Ms Halappanavar on antibiotics on Monday 22 October. RTE has also reported that Ms Halappanavar’s miscarriage took place spontaneously in theatre on Tuesday 23 October, rather than in the early afternoon of Wednesday 24 October, as reported in the Irish Times. 

I doubt I am alone in being confused by this affair, where even the most basic facts seem in dispute. 

Yours, etc,

I've seen people on Twitter asking when we stopped believing victims, and saying that they're tired of people claiming that the facts of what happened are unknown, but surely one thing the above shows is that the facts are most definitely in dispute.

On 'Coleman at Large' this evening, Kitty Holland admitted to Marc Coleman that there were problems with Praveen's account of things, and that there were differences between what he'd said when she'd originally interviewed him over the phone in India and then when she interviewed him again in Galway:

"All one can surmise is that his recollection of events -- the actual timeline and days -- may be a little muddled... we only have Praveen and his solicitor's take on what was in or not in the notes -- we're relying all the time on their take on what happened... Oh, I'm not satisfied of anything. I'm satisfied of what he told me, but I await as much as anyone else the inquiry and the findings. I can't tell for certain -- who knows what will come out in that inquiry? They may come back and say she came in with a disease she caught from something outside the hospital before she even arrived in, and there was no request for termination..."

Praveen has contradicted himself and changed his story several times, and the sequence of events as he describes them doesn't tally with that which purports to come from the hospital, and which you'd think the hospital ought to be able to substantiate.

That there are discrepancies in Praveen's account shouldn't surprise us, of course, given that the man spent a week watching his wife suffer and die -- distress, exhaustion, and trauma can lead to serious confusion, as horrible events all blur together.

But if the core structural facts are unclear, what credence should we place -- at the moment -- on any other details or claims? This is why I keep saying we have to wait, and is one of the reasons why I find the relentless linking of Savita's death to Ireland's law on abortion absolutely disgraceful. Doing this in the absence of facts and on the basis of a confused and contradictory narrative is at best lazily emotive, and at worst cynical and opportunistic.

There's also the fact that we have historically taken the line here of innocence till proven guilty; we don't believe victims straight off, and never have done. After speaking to victims -- and doing so sympathetically but not uncritically -- we always listen to the accused to find out their side of the story. 

And that, of course, has not been told.

Patience is a Virtue...

I'm a bit worried about the way things are developing regarding the Savita Hallapanavar story. Initially I was troubled by how pro-choicers seemed to be spinning a story markedly devoid of firm facts  in such a way that Savita Hallapanavar had been crowned in death as a martyr to political cowardice and Ireland's refusal to legislate for abortion; it's been the usual sheep who bleat about 'evidence-based reasoning' who've seemed most keen to shun evidence and reasoning in their eagerness to make spurious links on this one, dogmatically asserting that Savita died because of Catholicism and Ireland's abortion laws.

Now, though, I'm seriously bothered that pro-lifers might be so desperate to believe that her death had nothing to do with abortion that they leap on anything that supports their views. 

Yesterday, for instance, there was a letter in the Examiner which argued that Savita's death might have been due to an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria. 

This letter, from a Doctor J Clair, takes issue with how he believes the honour of the Irish medical profession has been impugned over the circumstances of Savita's death, which he thinks almost certainly had nothing to do with abortion:

"It appears to me that the problem was an unforeseen ESBL infection rather than an issue of obstetric mishandling.  

In my experience of over 30 years with clinical antibiotic use, ESBL antibiotic resistance is by far the most worrying development that I have experienced.  

The insult to the Irish medical service is added to by the suggestion that the Indian Embassy is upset with the lack of abortion services in Ireland. 

This insult is further compounded by the fact the Indian subcontinent has played a major role in the spread of ESBL positive organisms."

Now, I'm not going to say that this is implausible, and we have heard of similarly antibiotic-resistant viruses making their way here from India and thereabouts, but I don't see that there's any way Dr Clair could credibly identify this as the cause of Savita's deaths without having seen her charts, such that this, surely, is conjecture. If, on the other hand, he's saying this because he's seen her charts, then wouldn't this constitute some kind of breach of confidentiality?

Unfortunately, others are running with this. One Ruari McCallion has a guest piece on Mark Lambert's blog today in which he elaborates on what Dr Clair says. 

"Mrs Halappanavar died of an antibiotic-resistant infection, specifically e.coli ESBL. She did not die from an abortion, from being denied an abortion, from Catholic teaching or from a confused legal system in Ireland.  

[...] 

Getting information has been like pulling teeth. I cannot mention names or attribute their comments even to ‘a doctor/nurse/paramedic at x/y/z hospital/surgery/healthcare trust’. I can’t even mention the area they live and practice; they are frightened of being traced and found out. That could have been put down to the fear that they were passing on hearsay and gossip – but the same story has come from multiple sources. It passes the usual tests of corroboration."

Mark's a decent, intelligent, and level-headed bloke who will have posted this in absolute sincerity and with the best will in the world, and though I don't know Ruari at all, I have no reason to doubt his integrity, but no matter he believes or why, I think it's deeply imprudent to push this line. Indeed, I think it's imprudent even to embrace this thesis.

We know precious little about what happened in Galway: we know that Savita had a miscarriage and died of an infection some days later; we know that she was started on antibiotics at some point, though we don't know when as her husband Praveen has contradicted himself on this point and the hospital has given a third possible date for this; we know that Praveen's timeline of events seems to be utterly irreconcilable with one purporting to come from the hospital.

That's about all that we can say for certain. We can't make assertions about what happened. We can really only point to the discrepancies and ask questions. Just as pro-choicers shouldn't be jumping to the conclusion that Savita died because she was denied a termination of pregnancy or because of any supposed uncertainty in Irish law, neither should pro-lifers be asserting that she definitely didn't die for those reasons, and grabbing at the claim that she died because of some subcontinental superbug.

It may yet turn out that pro-lifers indeed have blood on their hands on this issue, but we just don't know.  

We have to wait until the investigations do their work, and yes, I know it looks as though the HSE one looks fatally hamstrung because Praveen refuses to cooperate with the investigation -- not allowing it access to Savita's medical records -- because he says it won't be independent and because he says "the HSE are the ones who messed up Savita's care", but still, we have to wait.

Any assertions on this issue must be either sheer conjecture or based on information most definitely absent from the public domain. We can ask questions -- and let's face it, we ought to, as our journalists aren't exactly doing their job on that front -- but given how little we know, there aren't that many questions that legitimately fall within the remit of the general public. Certainly, we shouldn't assert anything. Things are mysterious enough, and no matter how good our intentions might be, it is, I think, deeply irresponsible to add anything to the current confusion.

We need facts, not wishful thinking, and information, not conspiracy theories. 

We have to wait. 

Paper Doesn't Refuse Ink, as my Dad says

Warning: this post does not have an inverted pyramid structure. The middle matters. Lots.

There's an interesting and important article by Kitty Holland in today's Observer about the tragic story of Savita Hallapanavar's death, with the most important sentence in the piece being buried in the middle of it all:

"Whether the fact that Savita had been refused a termination was a factor in her death has yet to be established."

Why is this the most important sentence? Because that's the sentence that pulls the rug out from under the whole piece. Savita's death has been reported worldwide, with Kitty Holland being the reporter who broke the story, and in explaining the story in the Observer, Holland makes it clear that from her point of view this story was always about abortion.

Holland says that her contact in the West told her of a woman who'd died after repeatedly requesting a termination. She realised that this could be a story with enormous political and constitutional ramifications, as abortion is the most divisive issue in Ireland and, she believed, the death of a woman in these circumstances was probably inevitable given the lack of clarity in law. Holland tracked down and rang Savita's husband, Praveen, who told her the story...

It was published, and went global. There was a spontaneous protest outside the Oireachtas, with up to 2,000 people there, or so Holland says, though the Gardaí put the numbers at about 700, and RTE and Channel 4 had reported that the vigil was to be numbered in the hundreds. International attention increased, with Savita's parents being quoted as having accused Ireland of murdering their daughter.

"The pressure," she concludes, "for something to be done about the legal morass around abortion is greater than it has ever been – not only domestically but this time, it seems, from across the world. Praveen Halappanavar, a quiet-spoken, gentle young man who was so determined to tell me what happened to his young wife, may yet prove the loudest voice those seeking change here have ever had."

True. And yet as she admits in a single sentence buried in the middle of the column, this story may have nothing whatsoever to do with abortion.

'Never Again,' say the posters, 'Abortion rights now,' though a termination might not have saved Savita

Lessons in Journalism

The fact that it's buried in the middle is significant. Newspaper stories tend to be structured on the principle of an 'inverted pyramid', with the big stuff at the start and then stuff being decreasingly salient; a 'kicker' is frequently deployed at the end, to hammer home what the journalist sees as the key point.

People often read columns that way, after all. They look at the headline, read the first couple of paragraphs, skim down, and look at the last paragraph. I'm not sure if people read them that way because we realise they're written that way, or if they're written that way because we read them that way. I reckon it's a circular phenomenon, which is also handy for editors as it gives a general thumb on what to cut out for reasons of length.

Look at that piece again. The headline says that Savita Hallapanavar's death may stir Ireland to change over abortion. The first paragraph says that when Holland learned a woman had died after asking for a termination, she realised this could be a big story with massive political and constitutional ramifications. The second paragraph is all about abortion, and specifically says that the death of a woman in circumstances such as Savita's was probably inevitable given Ireland's laws. Then there are eleven paragraphs telling the story, before a final paragraph about abortion again.

And buried in the middle of the piece, in the eighth paragraph of fourteen, is the admission that the story may have nothing whatsoever to do with abortion.

How Little We Know...

Investigations have yet to take place into why Savita died. Not in the most straightforward sense, as we know she contracted E.Coli and septicaemia. Rather in the sense of when and how she contracted the infection that killed her, whether she was given the best healthcare possible, why exactly her request the pregnancy be ended was rejected, whether a termination would have saved her life or whether it might even have further endangered her.

We don't know any of this. Her medical charts are not in the public domain. These things are all about details and specifics, and those details and specifics have not been published. All we have to go on are the heartbroken words of a man who recently watched his wife die.

In the absence of the medical data, anybody -- even an obstetrician or gynaecologist, no matter how well qualified -- who insists that a termination would have saved Savita's life, or that it would definitely have endangered her further, is talking nonsense. Assertions in this matter are mere speculation, and conjecture, as a sensible pro-choice friend said to me yesterday, doesn't help.

We don't know if Savita died because she was denied the option of having a miscarrying pregnancy terminated. The head of Dublin's Rotunda Maternity Hospital says this case probably wasn't about abortion laws, and was almost certainly about how a clinical situation involving miscarriage-related infection was managed; whether different management of the situation might have saved Savita's life, he says, is something nobody can say. If we're honest we should admit that we know next to nothing about this. All we really have are questions.

A Couple of Questions

Not, of course, that you'd think that, to see the hysteria that the Irish media has kicked up, presenting the story as a straightforward tale of a woman who died because she was denied an abortion, with this decision being due to a lack of clarity in Irish law.

We just don't have the facts to say that. Just as an example of how little we know about this, and if you're familiar with the facts of the case as reported, ask yourself the following question: on what day did the hospital start Savita on antibiotics?

Tuesday? Well, that's certainly what Holland and Paul Cullen, the Irish Times' health correspondent, reported in Wednesday's Irish Times, in the most-read story in the newspaper's online history. Savita's husband Praveen is specifically identified as the source for this detail, with him placing it in the exact context of Savita shaking, shivering, vomiting, and collapsing; it was in response to this, he said, that "there were big alarms and a doctor took bloods and started her on antibiotics".

This is what prompted the Guardian's Health Correspondent, Denis Campbell, to end his piece on the coming investigations into what happened in Galway by saying:

"Savita appeared to be in trouble as early as Sunday. The apparent failure to recognise that risk then, and to start her on antibiotics until the Tuesday night, will be the most urgent question for those investigating."

Curious, isn't it, that the Guardian's health correspondent, looking at the facts of the case at least as initially presented, thought the most urgent question was not whether a preterm delivery would have saved Savita's life, but why the hospital didn't start Savita on antibiotics until two days after she would appear to have been in danger?

To his mind this seemed less like an abortion story than one about a failure to anticipate possible infection. But of course, he was entirely dependent on the facts as originally reported by the Irish Times, quoting an interview with Praveen that took place several days before the story was published on 14 November.

RTE, strangely enough, seems to suggest that this isn't what happened. The national broadcaster's website  states that it had obtained details of the timeline of events as viewed by Galway University Hospital, with the hospital saying that on Monday 22 October, "After 24 hours of admission, antibiotics are given."

So it would appear that on this, at least, Praveen and the hospital disagree. Except that Praveen was interviewed by Kitty Holland a second time, this second interview being posted on the Irish Times' website for people to listen to. You should definitely do so, at least if you're genuinely interested in what happened in this horrible situation. About four minutes into this interview, Praveen clearly and explicitly states that the hospital put Savita on antibiotics on Sunday. He said that on Sunday Savita was told that it looked like the baby wouldn't survive and that it would be all over in four or five hours; she was put on a drip, he says, and the hospital started her on antibiotics.

Which was it? Tuesday, as Praveen originally said? Sunday, as he now says? Or Monday, as the hospital apparently says?

If you're still inclined to make assertions about this, try this: when did Savita's baby die?

Well, the initial Irish Times report stated that at lunchtime on Wednesday -- more specifically around two o'clock according to the interview which we can listen to --  the foetal heartbeat stopped, and Savita was taken to theatre to have contents of her womb removed.

But RTE reports that, according to the hospital, she was transferred to theatre on Tuesday, with spontaneous miscarriage happening there. Or at least, so I read the terse statement "Patient transferred to theatre. Spontaneous miscarriage occurs." The hospital account seems to suggest that this happened late on Tuesday night, as it says Savita was taken from theatre to the Intensive Care Unit on Wednesday.

Or was she? Because that's not what Praveen says. He says, on the recording, that Savita was taken to the High Dependency Unit and Praveen went there with her. He says he went home at about ten at night to freshen up, and between half eleven and twelve he got a call from the hospital and rushed there as she had been transferred to the Intensive Care Unit.

Not Just Difference of Interpretation; Differences of Fact

We probably shouldn't be surprised that the hospital's version of events, even in this bald form, is substantially different from what the Irish Times has published. Remember James Reilly's admonition not to prejudge things, and his caution that he was privy to facts that he wasn't privileged to share? Look at the problems that even a cursory comparison of the two timelines present us with:

• The Irish Times quotes Praveen as saying that the hospital started Savita on antibiotics on Tuesday and features a recording of a later interview with him saying it did so on Sunday; RTE reports the hospital as saying that she was started on them on Monday.
• The Irish Times reports Praveen as saying that the baby died at lunchtime on Wednesday, but RTE says the hospital has it that spontaneous miscarriage occurred in theatre on Tuesday.
• Praveen says that Savita was taken from theatre to the High Dependency Unit on Wednesday as the hospital said she should spend a few hours there, that he followed her there, and that approaching midnight he got a call which caused him to hurry to hospital as Savita had been taken to the Intensive Care Unit; RTE says that the hospital says Savita was taken from theatre to the ICU on Wednesday, apparently without going to the HDU.
• I'm not even sure if the accounts of what happened on the original Sunday match up. In the recording Praveen describes himself being told by the doctor "It looks as though the baby's not going to survive," confirming that he was sure of this. The original Irish Times report described this by saying that Savita "was found to be miscarrying", which to an utter layman like me sounds absolutely certain. But according to RTE, the hospital say that Savita was taken to the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Unit with "a threatened miscarriage". Now, I'm obviously no expert, but this sounds like something like a situation where the baby* could perhaps be saved.

Still, even without getting into what happened on the original Sunday, it still seems clear that the two accounts are utterly impossible to reconcile. Either Praveen is wrong, or the hospital is wrong, or RTE's source isn't in fact the hospital and is making things up. I have no idea of telling which is which, and right now I think there are very few people who do. 

If RTE's source is indeed the hospital -- if this is indeed the timeline of events as viewed by the hospital -- then we have to think about what this would mean. Even with poor documentation, the hospital should have clear records of what day Savita was taken to theatre, and whether she was taken straight from theatre to the ICU or whether she first spent a few hours in the HDU, and there should be very clear records of when antibiotics were started.

If the hospital's paper trail matches the timeline as given by RTE, then this surely means that either the hospital's story is substantially correct and Praveen's is wrong, for whatever reason, or else that there has been a massive effort made in the hospital to cover up something very dodgy. If it's the latter, we'd be dealing with massive malpractice, and a huge cover-up.

And no, I'm not suggesting that for an instant. But that's what this would mean, if it were the case.

Right now we just don't know, which is why we have to wait for the hospital's own investigation and the HSE's investigation to be complete. Faced with a story as shocking as this, people have serious grounds for worry, and even for anger, but we don't know what we should be worried or angry about.

As Kitty Holland says, in the middle of today's column, it has not yet been established whether Savita's death could have been avoided had her reported request for a termination been granted.

Note to the Irish Fourth Estate: the Spectator sees more of the Game

Certainly, one thing I'm worried about is the quality of journalism in Ireland at the moment.

How has the Irish Times ran two conflicting versions -- one written, one aural -- of the same story, and not noticed that they contradict each other? Did Kitty Holland not spot, the second time she interviewed Praveen, that his story had changed in at least one small but vitally important respect?

How has nobody picked up on the fact that the sequence of events as described by the Irish Times, with Praveen as a source, and RTE, dependent on the hospital's viewpoint, are completely at odds with each other?

Why is the Irish Times coverage of this against the backdrop of how things are so much better in Britain, glossing over how many women die in Britain every year from pregnancy-related sepsis, and with Britain's law spectacularly** misrepresented?

Why hasn't the Irish Times reported on the apparent fact that pro-choice groups in Ireland were given wind of a 'denial of abortion' story several days before the Irish Times ran Kitty Holland's and associated pieces?  Just judging by what I noticed on Twitter on Tuesday night it seemed to me that last Wednesday's vigil, for instance, was as about as spontaneous and organic as such things can be, but it also seems clear that certain people who advocate abortion pretty much on demand -- clarification on 'X' looking like little more a a wedge for them -- were well positioned that day to shape the story of Savita's death as a 'denial of abortion' one, when it may have been nothing of the sort, and to whip up popular rage on this issue. At the very least, surely any responsible paper should be asking whether cynical opportunism is at work...

And why on earth is it that nobody's screaming about how the Irish Times is reporting that the Gardaí say 10-12,000 people took part in today's march through Dublin in remembrance of Savita, demanding that Irish abortion law needs to be changed so nobody else need ever die as she did -- even though, as noted, no link between the two has yet been established -- while RTE is saying that Garda figure is merely that more than 6,000 people marched?

Other parts of the march, to be fair, looked more dense than this.

Though I'd not rule out the larger figure, I find the smaller one a bit more plausible, given that this march took up six or at most seven times as much space on the ground as the 'March for Choice' one in early October that had just 850 people in. Thereabouts, anyway. You remember, the one where Garda estimates, as reported in the Irish Times, were dramatically and mysteriously raised from about 800 to more than 2000. 'Several thousand', as the Irish Times eventually put it. But still, surely the thing to wonder is why the Gardaí are supposedly giving out different figures for this.

This stuff is serious. We need to be honest here, and refrain from manipulating numbers because we don't like how they don't suit us, holding off until the facts are in before jumping on stories that suit our agendas.

It may well be that pro-lifers are going to find that they have blood on their hands over this, but we just don't know. As things stand, it's almost as though Irish journalists have en masse decided to abandon all pretence of objectivity, and have taken sides, like cheerleaders with typewriters, the very thing that former Irish Times sports writer Tom Humphries rightly said journalists should never be.

There are investigations going on. We need to wait.

______________________________________________________________________
* I've noticed no shortage of people out there sneering at pro-lifers describing Savita's daughter as a baby, rather than a foetus. You can see a good example of that quoted over on this midwife's blogpost on the matter. Here's the thing: it's clear that Praveen and Savita called their unborn child a baby. Listen to the long interview with Praveen on the the Irish Times website. He repeatedly refers to his daughter as a baby.

** The other day, for instance, there was a piece entitled 'What would have happened in Britain?', which cited two of Britain's leading abortion providers as sources and wrongly claimed that British doctors "are legally able to carry out abortions until the 24th week of a pregnancy for all reasons, not just medical". This is a commonly-held and utterly false trope in Ireland; abortion is fundamentally illegal in Britain even now, under the terms of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act or the 1929 Infant Life (Preservation) Act.

Rather than legalising abortion, the 1967 Abortion Act conferred certain defences against illegality upon doctors who carry out terminations, provided the terminations cab be justified under at least one of five grounds. Two of these grounds, being injury greater than that caused by termination to the health of the woman or her existing children, are subject to a 24-week gestational limit. British doctors are most definitely not allowed to carry out pregnancies up to that point "for all reasons", which is why there was a huge ruckus earlier this year when it was discovered that British clinics were aborting babies because their parents didn't want to have baby girls.

And the Irish Times know this: it specifically reported on this issue back in February.

Medical Malpractice and Treating Tragedies as Political Footballs

The horrific news last night that a 31-year-old dentist, Savita Halappanavar, died from septicaemia a fortnight ago following a miscarriage in Galway University Hospital looks almost as perplexing as it is tragic. I'm glad that two investigations are currently taking place into what exactly happened, because the whole thing mystifies and appalls me.

Seemingly Savita presented at hospital seventeen weeks pregnant and in extreme pain, and was told she was miscarrying; the following day she asked for the pregnancy to be terminated, but was denied one on the basis that the child was still alive, with somebody saying 'this is a Catholic country'; she remained in pain for two-and-a-half further days until the foetal heartbeat stopped. 

The Irish Times goes on to say that the third day Savita was in hospital she asked if labour could be induced to end the pregnancy, but the consultant refused, again apparently saying it was the law and 'this is a Catholic country'. Savita remained in agony all that night and into a fourth day, but the hospital refused to end this. Eventually the foetal heartbeat stopped, and Savita was taken to ward.

Two days later she died.

Obviously this is horrible, sickening, and tragic. 

I hope those investigations get to the bottom of what happened. I'd hope too, that appropriate action be taken if anyone claimed that the hospital couldn't help Savita as it would be against the law for it to do so, especially on the spurious grounds that, as was supposedly said, 'this is a Catholic country'. And if the hospital's negligence veered into the realms of the criminal, then I really hope there are suitable consequences.

The thing is, assuming that the reporting is accurate, and given the Irish Times' recent record on life issues, it may not be, this doesn't make sense. As far as I can see, Galway University Hospital would have been fully within its legal rights to have induced a preterm delivery -- or foetal evacuation -- in an attempt to save both mother and child. Indeed, not merely would it have been within its rights to do so, doing so would have been normal medical practice. 

This is exactly the sort of thing that Dr Berry Kiely talked about back on what was an uncommonly good Vincent Browne show back in the Spring -- you induce a preterm delivery, thus saving the mother, and you do everything you can to try to save the child. You almost certainly fail, but you try. 

In 2000, Professor John Bonnar, then chairman of Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which represents 90%-95% of Ireland's obstetricians and gynaecologists, explained the situation to the All Party Oireachtas Committee's Fifth Report on Abortion as follows:

'In current obstetrical practice rare complications can arise where therapeutic intervention is required at a stage in pregnancy when there will be little or no prospect for the survival of the baby, due to extreme immaturity. In these exceptional situations failure to intervene may result in the death of both the mother and baby. We consider that there is a fundamental difference between abortion carried out with the intention of taking the life of the baby, for example for social reasons, and the unavoidable death of the baby resulting from essential treatment to protect the life of the mother.'

In other words, for the hospital to have induced labour of the foetus with the intention of saving Savita, would, surely, have been in accord both with Irish law and normal Irish medical practice. It seems that such situations have nothing to do with the X Case, for all the well-meant cries that the failure of the Oireachtas to legislate for that is to blame here.

Bonnar elaborated on such situations as follows:

'We have never regarded these interventions as abortion. It would never cross an obstetrician’s mind that intervening in a case of pre-eclampsia, cancer of the cervix or ectopic pregnancy is abortion. They are not abortion as far as the professional is concerned, these are medical treatments that are essential to protect the life of the mother. So when we interfere in the best interests of protecting a mother, and not allowing her to succumb, and we are faced with a foetus that dies, we don’t regard that as something that we have, as it were, achieved by an abortion.  

Abortion in the professional view to my mind is something entirely different. It is actually intervening, usually in a normal pregnancy, to get rid of the pregnancy, to get rid of the foetus. That is what we would consider the direct procurement of an abortion. In other words, it’s an unwanted baby and, therefore, you intervene to end its life. That has never been a part of the practice of Irish obstetrics and I hope it never will be.'

Despite having no shortage of friends who are medical practitioners of one sort or another, including embryologists, obstetricians, and midwives, I'm obviously not one myself so I'm not qualified to judge, but it seems to me that at least on the basis of the facts as reported, this was a straightforward and stomach-churning case of shocking -- possibly even criminal -- medical malpractice with a tragic outcome.

After all, section 21.4 of Ireland's Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics for Registered Medical Practitioners seems to be unambiguous about this sort of situation, saying exactly what Professor Bonnar said to the Oireachtas Committee:

'In current obstetrical practice, rare complications can arise where therapeutic intervention (including termination of a pregnancy) is required at a stage when, due to extreme immaturity of the baby, there may be little or no hope of the baby surviving. In these exceptional circumstances, it may be necessary to intervene to terminate the pregnancy to protect the life of the mother, while making every effort to preserve the life of the baby.'

This is indeed the standard by which this affair should be judged. The problem here wasn't with the law.

The problem wasn't with religion either, for all that people are leaping to blame Galway's religious ethos, or the stupid and bizarre claims that 'this is a Catholic country'. Leaving aside how Ireland is not legally defined as a Catholic country, Catholic teaching allows for the normal Irish medical practice in this case, just as Irish law does. 

The problem seems to have been solely with somebody -- for whatever reason -- failing to obey both the law and the medical profession's own code of conduct, and attributing their failure to Ireland being -- supposedly -- a Catholic country. If that's what's happened then people should be bloody furious about this.

But while anger's one thing, it makes no sense to talk of how this tragedy means we should change the law to make sure that this doesn't happen again. Law isn't magic: if doctors can disregard law and medical practice now, then they can do so in the future, regardless of what the law says.

At least based on the facts as reported, I don't see how new legislation would help here. There are clearly people who think Ireland's laws, which require that human life be respected and protected from conception to natural death, are barbaric and oppressive. I understand that, but regardless of what they think, it really seems that Ireland's laws weren't at fault here. I may turn out to be wrong, but as far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with the X Case.

There are investigations that need to run their course. There'll be a time for anger, and we should make sure it's the right kind of anger, and directed at the right target. In the meantime, I think it'd be best if Savita Halappanavar weren't treated as a political football.


Update: It's been pointed out to me that according to the reports, Savita was admitted to hospital with a miscarriage underway, her cervix being open from Sunday, but that antibiotics were only brought into play on Tuesday night, a full two days later; it's as though she spent two days there with an open wound. Again, I'm no doctor and would appreciate if someone could clarify this, but given that this was a case of death from infection,  it seems to me to have been utterly egregious medical negligence from the start, and nothing whatsoever to do with the law, medical guidelines, or religious principles. 

Choose Life. Choose Military History. Choose Counting.

A hundred or so years ago, the Prussian Hans Delbrück transformed military history when he sought to show how warfare and politics mirrored each other as social activities. Using his method of Sachkritik, he analysed historical battle narratives in the light of simple physical realities and what was known to have happened in other battles.

I used to enjoy explaining this to my students back in the day. Military history, as a lecturer on the American Civil War had pointed out to me once upon a time, doesn’t make much sense without maps, and as I said to my students, armies aren’t just dots on those maps. They take up space. People just tend not to realise how much space crowds can take up...

The figures of Herodotus, so-called father of history, had long been viewed askance by historians, but it took Delbrück to show just how ropey those figures were. Herodotus claimed that the Persian army that invaded Greece in 480 BC was made up of 2,641,610 soldiers, and an equal number of servants and camp followers. As an exercise, Delbrück imagined how much space such an army would have taken up had it followed the Prussian marching system:

“According to the German order of march, an army corps, that is 30,000 men, occupies about three miles, without the baggage trains. The marching column of the Persians would therefore have been 420 miles long and as the first troops were arriving before Thermopylae the last would have just marched out of Susa on the other side of the Tigris.”

These were German miles rather than the ones we know, and the Persians obviously didn’t march in the Prussian fashion, but still, Delbrück had made his point: Herodotus’ figures were ludicrous.

Delbrück didn’t stop at the soft target that was Herodotus, either; he went on to explain the impossibility of Atilla the Hun easily moving an army larger than the Prussian one of 1870 across an area that at that time lacked decent roads, and to show through issues of food supply how Julius Caesar’s figures for his Gallic opponents had been grotesquely inflated to superb propagandist effect.

When I was doing my master’s degree on Hannibal’s victory at Cannae, I spent an immense amount of time grinding numbers in a way that numbed the brains of my friends when I talked of them. Marching rates. Space per man. Unit depth. Legion width. Quantity of vegetation needed daily to feed an elephant. Close order formation. Open order formation. Manipular replacement. Javelin range. It went on.

All of this stuff may have sounded boring, but it was needed as the nuts and bolts of assembling a thesis on what exactly happened in the biggest and bloodiest battle the Romans ever fought and lost.

Who said this stuff isn't useful?

I’ve moved into a more conceptual area of ancient and military history now, but the whole battle reconstruction thing has given me some habits. On Saturday they came into play. There was a march in Dublin on Saturday, billed as a ‘March for Choice’, with an expected attendance, according to the organisers, of thousands from across the island of Ireland.

It turned out to be rather a damp squib, with a few hundred gathering on O’Connell Street, and accumulating numbers as they made their way over the Liffey towards Kildare Street and round to Merrion Square.

Shortly afterwards, under the headline declaring “Low turnout for pro-choice rally”, the Irish Times reported on the march as follows:

“Less than 1,000 people joined the ‘March for Choice’ in Dublin this afternoon in what had been billed as the first major mobilisation of pro-choice activists ahead of the publication of a major report examining how the Government should deal with the abortion issue.

Organisers had predicted that several thousand people would gather for the march which left the Spire in O’Connell Street at 2pm ahead of a gathering at Merrion Square.

Those behind the march claimed that between in excess of 2,000 people took part howver gardai at the Store St station said that closer to 500 people had showed up for the event.”

This report was at odds with what people associated with the march claimed; the Labour senator Ivana Bacik said on Twitter that 5,000 had attended, and one person who’d acted as a steward on the march wrote on Facebook that she had personally counted 3,200 people, with a Garda she spoke to having said that between 3,000 and 5,000 people had marched. Sinéad Redmond, one of the march organisers, rejoiced at how happy the 5- to 7,000 who she said had marched were.

Graham Linehan, ever the sentinel of the internet, declared on Twitter that “The Irish Times is a ****ing rag”, subsequently saying that Irish Times’ reporting was either prolife propaganda or sheer laziness; not for one moment does he appear to have entertained the possibility that it might have been right.

People connected with the march began appealing for pressure to be put on the Irish Times to change its story, and eventually it did so.

Why exactly did you change your story?

You can read the story of what happened elsewhere, but what’s significant is that after vocal public criticism of the paper, the Irish Times sought a different Garda source to that it had originally contacted and under the headline “Thousands attend pro-choice rally” declared:

“Several thousand people joined the ‘March for Choice’ in Dublin this afternoon in what was billed as the first major mobilisation of pro-choice activists ahead of the publication of a major report examining how the Government should deal with the abortion issue. Organisers had predicted that several thousand people would gather for the march which left the Spire in O’Connell Street at 2pm ahead of a gathering at Merrion Square. Several hundred people gathered for the start of the march, with their numbers swelling by the time it reached St Stephen’s Green.”

The final version of the story was much the same, save for apparently giving the lie to the headline:

“Their numbers swelled to several thousand by the time it reached St Stephen’s Green. The Garda Press Office, which earlier put the number of attendees at about 500, said this evening there ‘may have been in excess of 2,000 people involved’”.

So after repeated phone calls, the Guards shifted from saying that around 500 were involved to a claim that perhaps more than 2,000 participated, and after criticism from irate marchers and their sympathisers, the Irish Times went from reporting that fewer than 1,000 took part to claiming that several thousand marched.

The Journal reports that the Guards said about 2,500 were in the march. Even if true, this hardly merits the adjective ‘several’ the Irish Times is now talking of, it has to be said.

You see, it's all about the Personal Transferable Skills

Now, let’s think about numbers. I know, whether it’s right or not to end the life of another human being isn’t a numbers game, but we’re solely talking about reporting and how numbers can be used to propagandist effect.

As people argued on Saturday afternoon about the numbers attending, a common cry on the pro-choice side was to look at the video, as the video showed that there were thousands of people on the march, not just a few hundred.

It’s worth looking at the video, shot by Darragh Doyle just by the Shelbourne Hotel. It’s difficult to estimate numbers on it from a casual glance, as Darragh pans back and forth several times, giving the impression of a vast throng of people. The video lasts for just over two and a half minutes, and for the first minute and a half the marchers can be heard eagerly chanting – those bringing up the rear just amble along chatting to each other.

With some judicious use of the pause button, it’s easy enough to make a stab at numbers here, even with the extravagant camera movements. Easy, that is, unless you just stare and think “there are loads of people... there must be thousands!”

The marchers were marching in informal rows four, five, six, eight, maybe even ten across on the odd occasion. Most rows, for want of a better word, seem six or seven across. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the typical row is eight across, and then count the people who go by the camera, as though each is the end of a row. You won’t get an accurate figure, but you’ll get a ballpark one, something to give you a fairly decent feel for the size of the crowd. I tried it on Saturday, and made it about eighty rows, before what looked like an uncountable mass at the end. 640 marchers, plus maybe another 150, so. 790 people, allowing for error. How much error could I have made, though?  Could I have undercounted by more than one or two hundred?

I tried again earlier today with a different approach, thinking about how much space those marchers seemed to have covered, and bearing in mind how a friend on the march has said on Saturday that the marchers had been almost the full length of Kildare Street; he reckoned there’d been about 1,500 or so there.

Looking at Google Maps, it seems Kildare Street is about a thousand feet long, so let’s assume my friend was right – allowing for slight exaggeration – and that the march occupied more than three quarters of the street. 800 feet of marchers, so, on a street about 30 feet wide.  This would probably provide room for 960 Roman soldiers, give or take; more could have been fitted in, but only in a very packed formation. I could do the sums, but it’d take us off topic by some way.

The people in the march weren’t packed together. Their deployment, for want of a better word, was nothing like a Roman army in close formation. The rows, however wide, were fairly close together at the start, maybe three feet or so apart, but by the end the marchers – dawdlers in many cases – were well spaced out, some pushing buggies or even cycling! There was no comparison between the relatively close front rows, with their chanting and shouting, and the stragglers at the back, strolling along and having a natter. Given this disparity, it’d have been reckless to have counted, say, all the rows in the front hundred feet of the march and then multiplied it out, as is a fairly standard way of calculating the numbers involved in a march.

Now, in case you’re wondering, I was a teenage Commerce student, doing statistics and economics etc before changing subject and doing something more challenging the following academic year, so am reasonably clued in to how statistics work. I know that when moving crowds need to be counted, professional crowd counters use assigned counters to tally people passing points in given time periods and calculate upwards accordingly – indeed, I’ve had friends who’ve done this – but for a crowd this small that kind of thing is neither worthwhile nor necessary.

After all, during the two-and-a-half minutes’ filming, Darragh saw most of the march go past him; if he’d hung on for another minute, maybe 90 seconds, he’d have seen the last stragglers dawdle by. Four minutes. That’s not worth sampling.

It’s clear that there were no such counters present, in any case, and we don’t have high quality aerial footage of the march. We just have several foreshortened shots of the crowd, statements from marchers who – vested interests aside – were in the march and thus not really in a position to observe and count the marchers, widely differing guesses from the Guards, and a YouTube video that doesn’t even try to convey the march size in an accurate sense.

As such, flawed though it is, we can really only go by the YouTube video which shows that the marchers, even in the front ranks, were generally rather more than an arm’s width apart, and that towards the rear of the march the crowd density was a lot thinner than in the van. This wasn’t even a reasonably compact crowd.

Given how the spacing seemed to work, I couldn’t help but think the Roman figure gave a useful guideline for an educated guess. It looked about right, recognising just how spread out the march was. And it wasn’t that far off my first estimate. Again, it was only a ballpark figure, but it was one that suggested that the march probably wasn’t more than a thousand strong.

Or Counting. That’s good too. I learned that in primary school. 

Still, as discussion about this carried on today, I gritted my teeth and decided to count people in the video as best I could. Given the relatively small size of the crowd, this was going to be a manageable task, even if it was bound to be a tedious one.

I worked through the video, pausing and taking screenshots as I went, using banners and distinctive people in the crowd as markers for when I scrolled forward or to be returned to after Darragh had finished his latest bout of panning.

And then I worked through the shots, marking people with red spots. I decided to estimate upwards, such that anything I thought might possibly be a marcher would be counted as such. The handful of pedestrians walking past at a normal speed, rather faster than ‘marching’ pace, had to be discounted, of course.

I made it 850 marchers, more or less. 

Not a thousand. Not two thousand. Not five thousand, Ivana Bacik. Not seven thousand, Sinéad Redmond. Not a lazily non-specific several thousand, Irish Times.

Because even if I undercounted, and I suspect I'll have missed a few at the marker points each time, I didn’t undercount by that much. Don’t believe me? Well, why should you? Please try it yourself. It doesn’t take that long. We shouldn’t even need to have this discussion.

The rights and wrongs of abortion aren’t a matter of numbers, so I don’t see why those involved in Saturday's march have been so determined to exaggerate their numbers so egregiously. Still, if Saturday’s march tells us anything, at the very least it shows us that there’s no great democratic demand for abortion in Ireland.

850. The Irish Times was right the first time.

Surveying the Faith

Last week Red C Research published the findings of WIN-Gallup’s ‘Global Index of Religions and Atheism’, suggesting that Ireland was abandoning religion faster than almost any other country. The papers weren’t slow to regurgitate claims that whereas 69pc of Irish people were religious in 2005, only 47pc were in 2011. 

That’s not what the poll says, however. Contrary to Red C’s press release, the WIN-Gallup poll doesn’t find that Ireland is one of the least religious countries in the world; it finds that Ireland is one of the countries in which people are most reluctant to describe themselves as religious. This is a very different thing, not least as the word ‘religious’ means different things to different people. 

This was made very clear to me a couple of years ago at an Anglican church in Manchester, where I used to go so I could learn how evangelical friends lived their faith on their own terms, rather than relying on how my fellow Catholics described them. 

The curate spoke at length about how Christians shouldn’t be religious, because religious people are hypocrites. We’re called to love God, not to be religious, he said. Christianity, after all, isn’t a religion: it’s a relationship. 

I agreed with him up to a point. It’s a cliché that Christianity is a relationship rather than a religion, but it’s only a cliché because it’s largely true; the very word ‘Christian’ suggests that. 

Rather than meaning ‘follower of Christ’, it literally means someone who belongs to Christ as a member of his household. Romans 8:14-17 says that we’re brothers and sisters of Christ, God’s children rather than his slaves, and as 1 Corinthians 12:13 says, it’s baptism that adopts us into this family. 

Talking about this in the pub later, some of the regular congregation said they felt that the curate’s core point was sound but that he’d expressed himself poorly. Religious people can be hypocritical, but ‘religion’ shouldn’t be dismissed as mere lip service. 

Methodology

When discussing polls, it pays to look at the question and methodology. Ireland was one of the few countries in which this poll was conducted online; it’s difficult to see why Red C did this, as their website boasts of the accuracy of their telephone polling and warns that online polls are of questionable reliability in Ireland, where the over 55’s are inadequately represented in online panels and at least a third of adults lack internet access.

Red C's press release is adapted from WIN-Gallup's international press release, which conspicuously excludes Irish data from any tables showing how things have changed since 2005. Ireland, which Red C reports has experienced the second-largest decline in religiosity since 2005, is absent from the table of ‘ten countries experiencing notable decline in religiosity since 2005’, and from the two tables showing trends in religiosity and atheism in 39 countries surveyed in both waves.

It’s almost as though WIN-Gallup doesn’t regard the new data on Ireland as comparable with the 2005 data.

Allowing that the poll should be treated with caution, it’s hardly surprising that it found that the number of Irish claiming to be atheists seemingly has risen from 3pc to 10pc since 2005; the 2011 census figures and recent polls should have led us to expect as much. 

I doubt this figure will rise much further without government interference. If graphs in the official census highlights are remotely accurate, those most likely to deny a religious affiliation in Ireland are aged between 25 and 29, and even then only about 9.5pc of those do so. Denial of religious affiliation seems to drop back to 8pc among younger adults. 

Rather than rushing to embrace atheism, it seems Irish people are slipping into an ill-defined quasi-Catholicism, and it’s here that the question’s wording is all-important: “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?” 

The number of people willing to describe themselves as religious seems to have plummeted from 69pc to 47pc, whereas those rejecting atheism while saying they’re not religious seems to have risen from 25pc to 44pc. 

It’s difficult to tell what exactly this means, not least because the survey question – which confuses religious practice with atheistic belief – explicitly allows people who attend places of worship to say they don’t consider themselves religious. Red C thus observes that globally, “Most of the shift is not drifting from their faith, but claiming to be ‘not religious’ while remaining within the faith.” 

Judged purely on an Irish basis, this seems a fair judgement. The census found that 84pc of us still claim to be Catholic, even after the horrors of the Ryan and Murphy reports, but it’s clear that many of us have drifted from the teaching and precepts of the Church. 

Only about a third of us attend Mass every week, according to this year’s ACP and Irish Times surveys, while the Irish Times poll seemingly found a widespread rejection of basic Christian doctrines. For example, 15pc of those who’d call themselves Catholics don’t regard Jesus as the son of God, and 62pc believe that the Eucharistic elements merely represent Christ’s body and blood. 

Many who scorn atheism but wouldn’t call themselves religious would be among these; they’d probably consider themselves ‘spiritual’ rather than religious, or say that they have faith but disagree with organised religion. Others, though, would surely be ordinary Catholics, wary of boasting about their faith. 

Connotations

The word ‘religious’ carries uncomfortable connotations for a lot of us. A priest friend of mine once admitted that he found it hard to like a lot of religious people. “Some of the coldest, hardest, most unforgiving people I’ve ever met,” he said, “have been some of the most religious.” 

Outward Practice

‘Religious’, for him, clearly wasn’t a word to be crudely equated with ‘Catholic’ or ‘Christian’. It was, instead, something relating to outward practice rather than inward devotion; he’d found that people could be punctilious about their religious observance while being devoid of a spiritual inner life, or a simple love for other people. 

That’s not to say our external practice and attitudes don’t matter; on the contrary, they play a vital role in expressing and supporting our inner life. As Pope Benedict pointed out last week with reference to St Dominic: “… to kneel, to stand before the Lord, to fix our gaze on the Crucifix, to pause and gather ourselves in silence, is not a secondary act, but helps to us to place ourselves, our whole person, in relation to God.” 

Internal Realities

The problem, alas, is that too often our external and internal realities are at odds. Jesus made this unforgettably clear in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, in directing us to fast, pray, and give alms in secret, and in condemning as pedantic and hypocritical the ostentatious religiosity of the Pharisees. 

Familiar as we are with such admonitions, and increasingly suspicious of public displays of piety, it’s hardly surprising that for many of us the word ‘religious’ is a term we’ve become loath to apply to ourselves. Who wants to be seen as a ‘Holy Joe’, especially nowadays? Who dares to call themselves devout?


-- A version of this appeared in The Irish Catholic, 23 August 2012.

The Freedom of the Press

Well, the Irish Times is on form today. 

The Freedom to Have an Opinion

Here's Fintan O'Toole, for instance, talking about Seán Quinn:

'Fr Brian D'Arcy, who is supposed to be in the morality business, addressed the Ballyconnell rally and essentially credited Quinn with the creation of peace in our time: “He brought peace to the country by creating thousands of jobs.” 

Senior GAA figures such as Mickey Harte, Jarlath Burns, Seán Boylan and Colm O’Rourke threw that organisation’s considerable authority behind Quinn’s outright defiance of the courts and determination to hang on to public money. Thus, a formidable if unofficial nexus of Sinn Féin, the GAA and the church is giving Quinn comfort. 

 This desire to kiss the rod inflicting the pain is surely rooted in something older than the current fad for designer masochism – some twisted notion of ethnic and religious solidarity in which Quinn has to be protected because he’s one of us – a Catholic, nationalist, GAA man.'

This is after lots of valid stuff, it should be said, but still. Is it really right to say Brian D'Arcy supports Seán Quinn, therefore the Church is part of an unofficial triumvirate of forces supporting Quinn? Brian D'Arcy?

Remember what Fintan said about Brian D'Arcy a few months ago, when he took the view that D'Arcy having -- at his own discretion -- to have a fellow priest glance over his writings to make sure they weren't completely off the wall was the worst thing that had ever happened?

Fintan saw D'Arcy as being part a powerless priest, being sadistically humiliated -- no, really -- by a heartless and clueless hierarchy.  D'Arcy, more to Fintan's point perhaps, was a decent and admirable man, somebody who stood apart from the institutional Church.

But now? Well, now that D'Arcy's saying something that Fintan (rightly) disagrees with, he's been elevated in Fintan's eyes to an official spokesman for the Church. This is the kind of inconsistent, hypocritical nonsense that's rendering the Irish Times less relevant by the day.

The Freedom to Disturb Religious Ceremonies

It seems only fitting that it's sitting in an edition of the paper where an editorial begins by absurdly saying that a clear instance of disturbing the peace wouldn't be considered an offence in modern Ireland if it took place in a church, since we've all moved on from that auld religion hogwash now, thank God:

'It's likely that if three young women in balaclavas marched up uninvited to the altar of the ProCathedral to then perform a crude punk ballad lambasting the church and the Virgin Mary there would be calls for their prosecution. Disturbing the peace, blasphemy . . . Such appeals might well have prevailed a couple of decades ago. Not so, one hopes, today. We have as a society developed an understanding that the sometimes-uncomfortable price of democracy and free speech is the tolerance of speech of which we may disapprove, which may offend, which may be blasphemous – we’re even thinking of removing the offence from the Constitution.'

Yes, the Irish Times editorial line now seems to be that it would be okay to do this. I'm not saying that the Russian Orthodox Church's reaction to Pussy Riot's actions in a Moscow cathedral isn't a tad over the top, but really, is it really okay to interrupt a religious ceremony in this fashion? Does freedom of speech really mean a freedom to interrupt other's worship? Does the Irish Times believe that freedom of religion so irrelevant that people should be allowed to interfere with it whenever they want?

The Freedom to Drive Out Jews

Oh, and then there's another piece about circumcision, which describes one of the defining Jewish and Muslim practices as barbaric, wonders whether Germany should hold a referendum on children's rights, and insists that in a secular society the rights of children -- as the author sees them -- should always trump religious freedom.

He's basically saying that the right of a child to retain its foreskin is more important than the right of a child to be Jewish.

I'm not sure what thought he's given to what Jews and Muslims should do in any country where children cannot be circumcised. Sure, there's much more to Judaism, say, than circumcision, but then there's more to bread than flour; it's still an essential ingredient. Maybe he'd just rather there were no more Jews. 

I do wonder if the author, the Thailand-based Kenneth Houston, is aware that Germany doesn't do referendums, mainly because of Germany's bad experiences with Nazi demagoguery using them to steer the mob. Or maybe he just doesn't care. 

That said, I'd be curious to see some serious large-scale surveys asking people, simply, whether they'd been circumcised, and whether infant circumcision should be illegal. I've a very strong feeling that the vast majority of those who'd been circumcised would have no problem whatsoever with the practice continuing, while those opposing it would probably be, in the main, people who've merely heard about it.

As for those who'd ban it, what do they think Jews should do in a country where infant circumcision is illegal? Leave altogether? Engage in circumcision tourism, ensuring their children are born in countries where infant circumcision is practiced? Arrange for backstreet circumcisions? Or just abandon their ancestral faith?

(Illustrations, for what it's worth, are from the anti-circumcision, anti-semitic, and deeply improbable comic Foreskin Man. He's a bit of an advert for Aryan supremacy, really. He's also neither well-written nor well-drawn. Offensive on so many levels...)

A Republican Abroad: Reflections on Britain's Monarchy

I remember little about my first visit to England: being smacked for swearing, and meeting a cousin who I wouldn’t see again for more than thirty years; but then, I was barely two.

I was four the next time I visited, being roused from my bed in the dead of night by my dad, taken to my older sister’s flat, and bundled onto the boat, to sleep on the floor through the night and tread nervously across the gangway to Liverpool’s Pier Head in the morning, looking down at the Mersey’s dark waters. I wasn’t good at heights, even then.

I’ve clearer memories of that second trip, much of which was spent with a cousin a few years older than me: a taxi from the port to my mum’s elder sister’s house, my cousin teasing his older sister’s ‘yucky’ denim skirt and having his wrist hurt when one of his dogs tugged excitedly on the leash he’d wrapped around his hand, proudly whispering the few Irish words I knew to other cousins, skittering across the gravelled ground in a playground after ignoring instructions not to go on the slide as someone had put wax on it, admiring little rubber dinosaurs and finger monsters in a shop, and eating fish on Good Friday. I had a choice of packets of Monster Munch on the boat back home: not just the ones with the Cyclops on the back, the only ones you could get in Dublin, but ones with pictures and descriptions of the Minotaur and the Harpies too.

I’m not sure if modern crisp packets offer a rudimentary Classical education. I suspect not.

I really liked my knights

While I was there I was given a packet of toy knights by an aunt. Little silver-coloured plastic knights, wielding swords and maces. I was thrilled, and my cousin and I sat playing with them together by the window of the living room. ‘They protect the king,’ I said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said my cousin, ‘there are no kings anymore. Only queens.’  

‘What,’ I stared, ‘only queens?’

‘Only queens.’

A couple of years later a friend in Dublin earnestly informed me that the Queen had no power and that if she told me to kneel down in front of her then you wouldn’t have to, but that if Mrs Thatcher told me to then I would. That, of course, wasn’t an issue in Ireland, he said: ‘Because Ireland’s a free country.’

I had, it must be said, a somewhat confused childhood view of the British monarchy.

Strange though it seems, there were adverts on the telly when I was a boy, recruiting people for the Household Cavalry. I wanted to join, of course. Swords and breastplates, helmets and boots, black horses and red cloaks: the Life Guards looked like knights, and for a little boy besotted with the legend of King Arthur, this was clearly a career to which one should aspire.

Even now, I reckon the sovereign's escort justifies the monarchy's existence

Being English, my mother approved, though she was far less impressed by my reactions when she made me watch the opening of Parliament one year. The pageantry and the Queen cast no spell over me on that occasion, as I’d have rathered be drawing or reading or playing on the road: ‘Huh,’ I’d scowled, ‘I wish Guy Fawkes had blown it up.’

The years passed, and the British royal family’s shenanigans seemed like one of those soap operas that you never watch but occasionally notice in the background. To this day I’m not sure of the extent to which my memories of Charles and Diana’s wedding are my own or ones manufactured by Sue Townsend and planted in my head by the fictional pen of Adrian Mole. ‘Lady Diana is a commoner,’ I remember my Mam telling me. This mattered, clearly, and was a good thing, though I wasn’t sure why.

We had a Charles and Di tea caddy at home too, acquired at the time of the royal wedding. I think it lasted longer than their marriage. We told scurrilous schoolboy jokes about the royal family at school. ‘Did you hear that Princess Diana is forming a band with Chris Rea? She’s going to call it Diarrhoea!’* ‘Why does Prince Charles have a multicoloured willy? Because he dips it in dye so often!’

None too respectful, you’ll surely agree, but well, we were about ten, and it was no worse than what we sang about what the Queen got up to in 1976. No, I’ll not repeat it here.

A Modern Republic

Curiously, our own largely symbolic head of state, President Hillery, didn’t impinge on my consciousness at all. He met ambassadors, and signed legislation, and inspected the armed forces, and played golf, and generally kept to himself. I remember seeing a red squirrel when peering through the gates of his official residence one day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one since.

1990 changed that, of course, as we had the first presidential election of my lifetime, with Mary Robinson beating Brian Lenihan and Austen Currie in an AV election.** Robinson changed the Presidency dramatically, expanding the office beyond its official role of ‘Head of State’ to give it a new direction as – to borrow the terminology of Antony Jay’s Elizabeth R – ‘Head of Nation’. She deliberately imbued the office with symbolism, and paved the way for President McAleese’s two terms. McAleese’s presidency, I think most Irish people would agree, was a model of what the presidency can be, and her role in 2011’s visit of the Queen brought that home.

Those English people who seem to think that the only alternative to a constitutional monarchy is an American-style executive presidency merely show how limited their knowledge is of political systems. There are lots of ways to run republics.

Ah, sure, the English are known for the craic...

When I moved to England the first time, back in 2001, I was scornful of the monarchy; it was obviously an anachronism, and an indignified one at that. As the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday passed I muttered about atrocities being committed against the Queen’s subjects by the Queen’s soldiers, and as the Queen’s fiftieth jubilee approached I scowled and told my friends in halls that there was no way I’d be joining them at the jubilee party at our brother hall.

Minutes before my friends set out I relented, and nine of us headed off, arriving just as one corpulent student – a South African, I think – finished belting out ‘God Save The Queen’. We settled in for an evening of drinking games and even karaoke, with Russell, visiting Dave, insisting that we all join in a rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ that was as energetic as it was surely cacophonous. At the end a drunken undergrad stepped up to join us, so we left him to slur a high-pitched ‘any way the wind blows...’

Afterwards he challenged me to a fight with giant inflatable boxing gloves in the bouncy castle the boys had hired. I smiled and let him charge at me, and stepped aside so that he fell. He struggled to his feet, and I knocked him over again. And again. And again. Letting him steady himself, I waited for his charge once more and again stepped aside so he crashed to the mat. And again I smiled as he wobbled upwards, before knocking him over again.

Afterwards my friend Paul, who died in an accident almost exactly four years later, admiringly said ‘Mister Daly! I’ve never seen such malevolent delight on anyone’s face before!’ He definitely approved.

Back in our own place, we set up a table and chairs and sat drinking and chatting on the lawn till half four. Koji, a Japanese fellow in our hall, joined us and took to running about – for no discernible reason – with his T-shirt drawn over his head. Madeleine rested her head on my shoulder, and we all decided it was time to crash. We planned to rendezvous at breakfast, and belt out at least a bar or two of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to startle the undergrads, some of whom had witnessed our travesty.

Needless to say, not one of us made it to breakfast.

It had been an absolutely superb night, and the first one we’d had out in weeks where we hadn’t been on edge for half the evening, expecting some kind of trouble. Mary McAleese is great, I thought, but she’s not once given us an excuse for a party.

Not a system I'd establish, but one I can embrace

Last year’s Irish presidential election was a horrible affair, such that I don’t know many people who wouldn’t happily have had Mary McAleese for a third term if only the Constitution would allow it. There was something incredibly unedifying about choosing a head of state – who we’ve now come to think of as a head of nation – through an election that dragged all manner of dirty linen and closet skeletons into public sight.

British republicans who cry out for the glories of an elected head of state seem to be speaking from dogma, not experience; they seem like embodiments of the saying about the grass being greener on the other side. The fact is that there’s something to be said for people being reared and trained through decades for such a role, with there being no question of who the next in line for the job will be.

I’m still a republican, of course; even with nasty elections like the 2011 one I prefer the Irish model of having a largely ceremonial president to a largely ceremonial monarch as head of state, but I’ve come to see that the British solution isn’t that bad, really. It’s not one I’d invent if I were charged with coming up with a political system, but it’s not a bad one to have ended up with, and it's such that I'm wary of attempts to tinker with it. I'm not sure how many wooden blocks can be eased away before the Jenga tower falls.

The monarchy gives constitutional stability, and expresses national unity, and provides a justification for the country being called the United Kingdom, after all. Get rid of the monarchy and the UK would need a new name. For starters.

God save the Queen, so. On balance.



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* Yes, I know. Exactly the same joke was made about Chris Rea becoming lead singer of Dire Straits. It makes more sense in that context.
** Yes, because despite the lies of the No lobby in the 2011 AV referendum, more than three countries in the world use AV, with one of the ones using it being the only country with which the UK shares a land border. The first two times I voted it was in AV elections. I still think it's a better system than the absurdity that is FPTP, where the typical MP goes to Westminster having been voted for by fewer people than voted for other candidates.