Chesterton and Orwell: Reflections on 1984

“But among critics whose interest in Chesterton is extra-literary,” wrote Ian Boyd in John Sullivan’s 1974 work G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, “those who perhaps have done the most damage to his artistic reputation are a group who might be called the professional Catholics. For them, Chesterton is an institution to be defended rather than an author to be discussed.”

It’s an important point, and one I was reminded of yesterday when reading David Allen Green’s speculations that Orwell penned Nineteen Eighty-Four in response to Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I was tempted towards kneejerk reactions. They're rarely of use to anybody.

“Why did George Orwell call his last novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?” asks Green, “The usual explanation for the choice of title of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it was a play on the last two digits of 1948, the year the manuscript was finished. This has never convinced me. I think there may be a better explanation, which comes from George Orwell’s intellectual hostility to the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton.”

Afraid to come upon a blood red cup and the beating of the wings of an eagle...

Before observing that the action in Napoleon begins in 1984, Green concedes that the coincidence upon which his theory is based has been previously noticed, but says that he is unaware of any other attempt to assess the alternative explanation that he offers.

Green describes Napoleon as he understands it, and assembles an impressive litany of quotations from Orwell scornfully dismissing a host of Catholic writers for what he regarded as their intellectual dishonesty. Focusing on the preface to Napoleon, Green casts the book as a diatribe against progress and observes that:

“Taking the stories as a whole it is not too much of a strain to see Nineteen Eighty-Four as a riposte to The Napoleon of Notting Hill. There are many points of comparison. Both books show that a belief in revolution that appears to have gone wrong, and both focus on the frustrations of a sympathetic central character as he attempts to challenge the prevailing system. Both are utopian/dystopian visions, containing prophecies extrapolated from current trends.”

It’s an interesting thesis, but the more I look at it, the less I think it plausible, not least because it seems to me that although it's a commonplace among Chesterton fans that Orwell may have intended his title as a reference to Chesterton’s work, I think this unlikely; still less do I think Orwell's book a riposte to Chesterton's.

Wherever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow sunset, there my heart beats...
Even if we can dismiss as ahistorical the popular notion that Nineteen Eighty-Four was so named as a playful reference to 1948, the year in which Orwell finished writing it, we should at least recognise that there are other theories beyond the two Green cites.

“Orwell’s title remains a mystery,” wrote Robert McCrum in the Observer in 2009. “Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London’s novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984) or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton’s stories, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which is set in 1984.”

Well, only the opening sequence of Napoleon is set in 1984, the bulk of the book being set a decade later and the finale being set a further twenty years after that, and it’s rather stretching things to call Chesterton Orwell’s favourite writer, but still, McCrum’s general approach is sound; he doesn’t think the supposedly popular 1948-Nineteen Eighty-Four theory worth even a mention, and notes that there are several theories as why Orwell bestowed that now notorious date on the book. He could also have mentioned, for instance, the possibility that Orwell had been influenced by his late wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s poem ‘End of the Century, 1984’.

It seems at least as likely that the quest for what lay behind Orwell’s setting of his story in 1984 is a fool’s errand. Peter Davison’s note on the text of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of the novel notes that Orwell “first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness) that was changed to 1982, and, later, to 1984.”

There may, in short, be no special significance to the date.

That which is large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for the poor to defend...

That said, there’s much of value in the piece, not least the litany of quotations from Orwell’s writings which go some way to substantiating Randal Marlin’s observation in Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion that,

“Orwell had his baggage of prejudices, against Roman Catholics (Irish in particular) and gays, for example. G.K. Chesterton, who was not Irish, excited his great antipathy, perhaps because Chesterton was so adept at using words in defence of causes Orwell opposed and in ways that Orwell objected to, as explained in his essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’”.

Green's collection of quotations suggest that Orwell was less bothered by religious dishonesty than by Catholics. One thing that’s clear from them is that Orwell never really understood Chesterton, a failing which Greene seems to share. Green argues that the possibility that the title of Nineteen Eighty-Four was drawn from Napoleon “allows us to explore an often overlooked part of Orwell’s political outlook: the deep hostility of a decent and progressive liberal to the intellectual and moral dishonesty of religious conservatives.”

We’re into ‘begging the question’ territory there, but still…

A madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man...

One of Orwell’s earliest published writings appeared in Chesterton’s G.K.’s Weekly. Entitled ‘A Farthing Newspaper’, it dealt with corporate influence on public opinion through the news media, a concern which Chesterton shared and which has, of course, hardly become less relevant with the passing decades. John Rodden observes in George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation that – far from harbouring a deep hostility to a man who’d helped launch his career – Orwell generally admired Chesterton, who he resembled in many ways, notably in his patriotism and his love for the commonplace and the common man.

If Orwell developed an antipathy towards Chesterton, it was because he felt that in his later work he had sacrificed his talent and his intellectual honesty to propagandising for the Catholic Church; regardless of the merits or otherwise or Orwell’s analysis, it’s important to recognise that Orwell believed that the dishonesty he perceived was a hallmark only of “the last twenty years or so” of Chesterton’s life.

Most critics of Chesterton's work perceive a difference between his writing before December 1914 and his writing after his recovery from a rarely-broken coma that lasted for several months – Dudley Barker, surveying Chesterton’s oeuvre in Sullivan’s G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, observes that “not much needs to be said, indeed, about most of what Chesterton wrote after 1914”, and it’s this latter writing that Orwell so disparaged.

Napoleon, it should be pointed out, was not one of Chesterton’s later books; indeed, it was one of his earliest, published in 1904. Far from being “written from the point of view of a Catholic populist,” as Green says, Napoleon was written when Chesterton was an Anglican; indeed, Chesterton wouldn’t be accepted into the Catholic Church until 1922, eighteen years after Napoleon’s publication. Indeed, Napoleon is curious, as Christopher Hollis comments in his 1970 book The Mind of Chesterton, for being “alone among Chesterton's books,” almost devoid of references to religion.

Every man is dangerous ...  who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.

In truth, I’m not convinced that Green really understands Napoleon at all, not compared to, say, Terry Pratchett, who showed a sure understanding of the book’s engine when he said of Chesterton that:

“It’s worth pointing out that in The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill he gave us two of the most emotionally charged plots in the twentieth century: one being that both sides are actually the same side; it doesn’t matter which side we’re talking about, both sides are the same. This has been the motor of half the spy novels of the century. The other plot can’t be summarised so succinctly, but the basic plot of The Napoleon of Notting Hill is that someone takes seriously an idea that wasn’t intended to be taken seriously and gives it some kind of nobility by so doing.”

Consider Green's claim that the hero of the book is “Auberon Quin, an eccentric who suddenly becomes king.” Is this really accurate? I would have thought that insofar as Napoleon has a hero at all, it’s the ‘Napoleon’ of the title, the Adam Wayne who becomes Provost of Notting Hill and conqueror of London.

Does the book really focus on the frustrations of a sympathetic central character as he attempts to challenge the prevailing system? Hardly: Quin changes the system with ease, for a joke, and Wayne embraces the new system with a violent passion.

Can Napoleon really be described as either a utopian or a dystopian vision, containing prophecies extrapolated from current trends? Not really – Chesterton opens with a spread of the sort of predictions so common in his only day only to discard them and say that none of these prophecies or trends mean anything. People, he believes, don’t really change.

The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. ..

I’m not even convinced by the idea that Napoleon is best known nowadays for “its preface, entitled Introductory Remarks on the Art of Prophecy,” and supposedly a few hundred words long. The opening chapter bears that title, and it clocks in at 1,700 or so words, but I’m far from sold on the idea that this is why the book’s best known now, and I’m certain this isn’t “Chesterton’s clearest and best known statement against ‘progress’”, not least because it's not about progress so much as it is about prophecy, about whether the future can be predicted.

Chesterton isn't really interested in the prophecies of his contemporaries, after all; he needs his book to be set in places that he knows and loves, but cannot set it in his own day so casts his tale into the future, and needs to justify why it's not that different from the present.

What's more, if you take a look at the selected Chesterton quotations of ‘progress’ at the American Chesterton Society, you’ll see that not one is from Napoleon.

In any case, contrary to Orwell’s claim, Chesterton didn’t fear progress; what he was sceptical of was the cult of progress that was rife throughout the Edwardian era, before it was laid low in the trenches of the Western Front. And if Chesterton ever penned a definitive statement on that, it was in the second chapter of Heretics, published the year after Napoleon, and addressing themes he would return to again in 1908’s Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday.

I should stop, as I feel I’ve fallen into the trap of treating Chesterton as an institution to be defended rather than an author to be discussed. Boyd is probably right when he says that Orwell’s take on the later Chesterton as a violent propagandist is merely a hostile version of the caricatured portrait of Chesterton as Catholic champion so held forth by his Catholic supporters.

If you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time...

And there is something to be said for considering the idea that at some level Orwell might have written his work in response to Chesterton. That's what Christopher Hollis thought, at any rate:

“Chesterton wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill in 1904, proclaiming that he was narrating events that were to happen in eighty years time -- that is to say, in 1984. There is no exact evidence that Orwell had this coincidence in mind when he chose the title of his own book.

But, whether intentional or not, Orwell’s book, in which the death of freedom brought with it the death of every decency even down to the proverbial honour among thieves, was certainly a protest against the irresponsibility of Chesterton's forgetfulness of the great lesson: he who draws the sword will perish by the sword, and violence, when once employed, cannot easily be quenched. It is hard, as one looks at the tale of current violence, not to sympathise with Orwell's impatience.”

Chesterton, of course, wrote before the Great War in which his brother died, and the Spanish Civil War where Orwell witnessed the horrors of violence begetting violence.

Anyway, I may think utter bunkum the idea that Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 as a riposte to an intellectually dishonest Chesterton, but I’m glad I’ve been given food for thought. That original post is well worth the pondering, not least because it shows how a "decent and progressive liberal" can have an almost obsessive -- even bigoted -- antipathy towards Catholics.

Legislating for X: An Unorthodox View

And so the Oireachtas is conducting its hearing on how best to legislate for the X judgement, the Government having said that after pondering the Expert Group's report, they're going to legislate and regulate in accordance with the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1992 X case.

Labour's high command are rejoicing, as they look set to manage the rare feat of achieving something in their manifesto. Fine Gael are in disarray, as they'd said they wouldn't legislate for abortion. Pro-choicers are crying 'victory!'. Pro-lifers are weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. The bishops have finally found some backbone and said what they think. People who think that religious citizens shouldn't have a say in how their country runs things are angry. It's all very loud. It's hard to hear oneself think.

Still. We should try. I happen to think it's possible to legislate for X while still keeping Ireland abortion-free. Or, if you like, for both Labour and Fine Gael to keep promises that helped get them elected. I might be wrong, but hear me out...

Crossing the Red C, with some difficulty...

A few weeks back a poll found that 63pc of people wanted a new referendum on limiting the constitution such that a threat of suicide would be excluded as grounds for abortion, and 82pc wanted a new referendum to extend the grounds for abortion to include threats to a mother's health, or in cases where a woman had been raped. Leaving aside moral issues, I’m not sure how that would logistically be possible, as it’d mean that a right to abortion would be dependent on other legal processes and verdicts of guilt, but still, it seemed that 45pc of people wanted both to tighten and loosen the constitutional limits. 

It is possible to make sense of this, but doing so requires some contortion.

The same poll also found that 36pc of Irish people want abortion on demand, which is a depressingly high figure, but does at least suggest that the likes of Ivana Bacik and Clare Daly are most definitely in a minority, with most people recognising that without a right to life all other rights are meaningless, and that basic 'golden rule' ethics mean that we shouldn't will that others should suffer a fate we'd not have wanted for ourselves.

85pc of people in that poll said that they would be happy for the government to legislate in accord with the X case. Some pro-choicers have decreed that this means there's massive support for their position.

They'd be wrong. I support legislation for the X principles, and I'd not be the only pro-lifer who does so. The question, of course, is 'what sort of legislation?' and 'would it be enforced?' Because if we're to legislate in line with what the Constitution actually says, this would entail very narrow legislation, and would probably require serious and careful monitoring.

My biggest concern is that I'm not sure our politicians have the political will to do this.

Enter the European Court of Human Rights...

Unfortunately, most people still don't seem to get what the Supreme Court said in the X case, or what our obligations are in connection with the ECHR. The European Court of Human Rights wants us to clarify things, as the X judgment has remained a theoretical thing for twenty years: the ECtHR wants us to make this practical. There are plenty who point out that we don't need to do what the ECtHR says, and they're right, up to a point, but I tend to think that disregarding our treaty obligations is something we shouldn't do.

The ECtHR, in considering the X case and its ramifications, says this:

"The Court does not consider that the constitutional courts are the appropriate fora for the primary determination as to whether a woman qualifies for an abortion which is lawfully available in a State. In particular, this process would amount to requiring the constitutional courts to set down on a case by case basis the legal criteria by which the relevant risk to a woman’s life would be measured and, further, to resolve through evidence, largely of a medical nature, whether a woman had established that qualifying risk. However, the constitutional courts themselves have underlined that this should not be their role."

Or, in other words, courts have legal proficiency, not medical proficiency. They are simply not qualified to make medical decisions or to rule on medical matters. They may lay down legal principles, but it is inappropriate for them to evaluate medical situations.

Keep this in mind, and then remember what the X decision did: it established a legal test, as a way of interpreting the Constitution, and it applied that test in a real-life medical situation. The ECtHR is of the view that the first thing the Supreme Court did was entirely valid, and that, as a general principle, the second thing was outside its sphere of competence. Yes, it was legal, but only because in the absence of a consistent and transparent medical process, we didn't have any choice. It wasn't a good idea. It wasn't, as the ECtHR says, 'appropriate'.

Revisiting the X Case...

The central point of the X case revolved around the issue of whether the threat to a mother's life that justified a termination of pregnancy, should such a termination be necessary, had to be certain or merely probable.  Chief Justice Finlay ruled that:

 "... the test proposed on behalf of the Attorney General that the life of the unborn could only be terminated if it were established that an inevitable or immediate risk to the life of the mother existed, for the avoidance of which a termination of the pregnancy was necessary, insufficiently vindicates the mother's right to life. 

I therefore conclude that the proper test to be applied is that if it is established as a matter of probability that there is a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of the mother, which can only be avoided by the termination of her pregnancy, such termination is permissible, having regard to the true interpretation of Article 40.3.3° of the Constitution."

It's this test in accordance with which the government is obliged to legislate, not the X application, and it is only in accordance with our ECHR obligations, rather than the Irish Constititution that legislation is needed – Chief Justice Finley pointed out during the 1992 X case that “This Court has on a number of occasions said that legislation to protect constitutional fights is not strictly necessary”. 

Now, as the expert group has recognised, this test has two conditions:

“The Supreme Court in the X case held that the correct test was that a termination of pregnancy was permissible if it was established as a matter of probability that:

1) there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother; and

2) this risk can only be averted by the termination of her pregnancy.”

Over the past twenty years we've tended to emphasise the first condition and basically ignore the second. The issue in the X case wasn't whether terminations of pregnancy might be allowed in Ireland, in certain circumstances. It was proximity and magnitude of risk.

What was not in dispute was that termination should be permissible when it was the only option, the only way of protecting the mother's life.

"As far as practicable..."

This shouldn't surprise us. Take a look at the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution:

"The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right."

The State guarantees as far as practicable to defend and vindicate the right to life of the unborn, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother. Or, if you like, the State is bound to protect the lives of the unborn, as much as it possibly can, save where doing so would endanger the lives of their mothers. That's what the Irish people voted for in 1983. 

The crucial issue here, on which the X case turned, was what was meant by the phrase "as far as practicable". During the hearings for X, Justice McCarthy asked Peter Shanley SC, acting for the government, if he accepted that the 1983 amendment envisaged a 'lawful abortion' in Ireland, and Shanley said that he did:

"Yes, I accept that. For example, a mother suffering from a cancerous condition which requires chemotherapy has the right to have her pregnancy terminated. The pregnancy may be terminated if, but only if, there is an inevitable danger to the right to life of the mother."

(It's worth noting, of course, that Shanley wasn’t a doctor either, and that it's not a given that cancer treatment necessitates termination of pregnancy, as Frederic Amant, for instance, points out.)

Justice Hederman spelled out what the Eighth Amendment meant in this regard, saying:

"The death of a foetus may be the indirect but foreseeable result of an operation undertaken for other reasons. Indeed it is difficult to see how any operation, the sole purpose of which is to save the life of the mother, could be regarded as a direct killing of the foetus, if the unavoidable and inevitable consequences of the efforts to save the mother's life leads to the death of the foetus. But like all examples of self-defence, of which this would be one, the means employed to achieve the self-protection must not go beyond what is strictly necessary."

Hederman thus distinguished between the direct killing of a foetus and the death of a foetus as an ancillary consequence of another procedure, the intended aim of which is the preservation of life. 

Catholic moral teaching would use the terms 'direct abortion' and 'indirect abortion', based on a distinction between direct and indirect effect, an ethical principle which informs general medical treatment in Ireland, as 2000's Oireachtas Committee on Abortion recognised, noting that "It forms a crucial element in the Medical Council ethical guidelines in this area."

We needn't get hung up on McCarthy's phrase 'legal abortion'; contrary to the claims of some pro-choicers, this isn't a matter of wordgames, not least as the term 'abortion' has a fair few meanings, some of which seem to be incompatible. As William Binchy put it to the Oireachtas Committee on Abortion in 2000:

"… it’s not so much the language that counts here, it’s the activities that are done and the context in which they are done that’s important – the principles that underlie the activities in question."

Is abortion medically necessary?

What's the point of this issue of necessity? Well, the expert group says that one of the key principles underlying any method of giving concrete effect to the X decision is that:

"The constitutional obligation on the State is by its laws to respect, and as far as practicable, defend and vindicate the right to life of the unborn."

Any legislation that doesn't meet that obligation would be unconstitutional; any legislation that goes beyond facilitating termination of pregnancy save when it's utterly unavoidable if it's to remove a danger to a mother's life would simply be in breach of the Constitution. 

Finley's little word 'only' is probably the key to this whole thing.

Abortions clearly take place to save the lives of mothers. They’re rare, but they happen. In England and Wales, for instance, 46 of the 189,931 abortions performed in 2011 – that’s 0.02pc of the total – were carried out in order to protect the life of the mother, one being an emergency abortion, and all others being ‘Ground A’ abortions, justified on the basis that:

“the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman greater than if the pregnancy were terminated”

Abortions under Ground F to save a mother’s life in an emergency situation are incredibly rare in England and Wales. There was, as noted, only one such in all of 2011, and seemingly not one Irish resident has undergone a ground F abortion there since the X case in 1992.

Given that roughly 4,000 of Britain’s roughly 190,000 annual abortions are performed at the behest of Irish women, it seems that approximately one in 47 abortions in the UK is an ‘exported’ Irish abortion. And, as we’ve seen, it looks as though 46 British abortions a year might pass the X test. Leaving aside margins of error, and bearing in mind the fact that the figures tend to be roughly the same each year, the statistics suggest that in any given year, one of these 46 will probably be performed for an Irish mother. One. 

The thing is, though, that this one might not meet the X criteria. Even if it meets the first criterion, there being a real and substantial risk to a mother’s life, would it meet the second?

What these rarities don’t establish is whether these abortions were the only way of saving those women’s lives. That’s the key question: is it ever the case that the only way to save a mother's life is to perform a direct abortion?

Pro-lifers will invariably say ‘no’, and that there are always other ways of protecting women, including interventions -- indirect abortions, if you will -- which inadvertently result in the deaths of unborn babies*. They tend to have the medical profession on their side on that one. 

It’s important to understand in this context that Britain’s 1967 abortion law doesn’t make abortion legal, but instead gives doctors a number of defences for situations where they believe it’s necessary to perform abortions. Treatment for ectopic pregnancies and so forth were never deemed offences under under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, so the 1967 act didn’t give doctors defences for dealing with such terrible situations; treatment for ectopic pregnancy isn’t classed as abortion in UK law and are counted separately from abortions.

Those who disagree will generally change the subject when asked to give examples of instances where abortion -- understood as direct targetting of unborn human beings -- is the only possible way of saving a woman's life.

Often they'll move the conversation to the issue of suicide. If, as in X, a mother threatens her own life, then it can be directly necessary to save her life. Leaving aside the fact that in X abortion manifestly wasn't necessary to protect X, such that it didn't pass its own test**, let's think about this.

Abortion and the risk of suicide

The Samaritans and the Irish Association of Suicidology advise that “suicide is never the result of a single factor or event”, and that “The reasons an individual takes their own life are manifold, and suicide should not be portrayed as the inevitable outcome of serious personal problems.”

These same guidelines recognise that "not all people who die by suicide have mental health problems at the time of death", but point out that the majority of those who kill themselves do, and Britain's Centre for Maternal and Child Enquiries said in its 2011 report that while suicide when pregnant is a relatively rare phenomenon, suicide in pregnancy or post-delivery tends to be linked to mental illness.

The evidence is pretty clear that there's no medical basis for presenting abortion as a medical solution to any mental health problem; it may not make things worse for women, but it is unlikely to make things better. Even Fintan O'Toole conceded this recently when he said::

"Last year, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges in the UK commissioned a systematic study of global scientific evidence on this question. It found: 'The rates of mental health problems for women with an unwanted pregnancy were the same whether they had an abortion or gave birth.'"

It's not just Fintan who recognises that abortion doesn't help women's mental health. In 2011 the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists issued the latest revision of their evidence-based guidelines on the care of women seeking induced abortions, stating that:

“Women with an unintended pregnancy should be informed that the evidence suggests that they are no more or less likely to suffer adverse psychological sequelae whether they have an abortion or continue with the pregnancy and have the baby... Women with an unintended pregnancy and a past history of mental health problems should be advised that they may experience further problems whether they choose to have an abortion or to continue with the pregnancy.” 

Given this it is, of course, rather surprising that the vast majority of abortions in Britain are on mental health grounds. 185,973 -- 98pc -- of Britain's abortions in 2011 were 'Ground C' abortions, that is, they were permitted because "the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman". It would seem that almost all of these were on mental health grounds, to judge by the previous year when 185,291 abortions -- again 98pc -- were Ground C abortions, with 99.96% of these reported as being performed because of a risk to the woman’s mental health.

With UK law saying that abortion on mental health grounds is permissible only when the risk of injury to mental health would be lower if an abortion were performed than otherwise, and with the medical evidence now recognised as showing that mental health problems are not reduced by abortion, it seems that such abortions in Britain are almost invariably performed in defiance of UK law.

Setting aside the Supreme Court’s application...

The expert group, listening to the ECtHR and looking at the X decision, made some interesting decisions. They seem, effectively, to have disregarded the X application, and paid heed only to the X test.

The preface gives a clue to why they did this, saying:

“The members of the group who are not doctors are not settling legal issues, the lawyers are not deciding medical controversies and the administrators are not adjudicating on the medical or legal questions.”

In this they recognised areas of competence, noting that medical matters are beyond the competence of legal professionals; this was in line with the ECtHR’s recognition that courts – even the Irish Supreme Court – are inappropriate fora for deciding medical controversies.

The group was adamant that abortion – in the context deemed permissible by the Supreme Court – should be considered a medical procedure, noting:

“Given the circumstances in which a right to a lawful termination of pregnancy would arise, i.e. when there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the woman which can only be averted by the termination of her pregnancy, this procedure would necessarily fall under the category of medical treatment.”

As such it envisaged any decisions that abortions should be necessary as having, by definition, to be made by medical professionals. The Supreme Court, in the X case, had received no medical evidence, relying instead on the evidence and opinions of a psychologist; from the point of view of the expert group, that’s not good enough.

The expert group, then, have recommended to the government that in a situation where a suicidal woman might seek an abortion, the decision as to whether or not it should be granted should be an exclusively medical one. Doctors, probably including at least one psychiatrist, would have to be able to swear that an abortion was granted because there was no other way of saving that woman’s life.

Enforcing the ‘Only’

As we’ve seen, abortion almost certainly wouldn’t help alleviate any suicidal ideation or other mental problems said woman might be suffering, such that granting it would probably be illegal even in Britain.

In Ireland, however, the bar would have to be set much higher; if the Constitution is to be respected, doctors would be barred from granting abortions when they see them as the best, or the most convenient, or the most humane solution. They’d only be allowed to grant them when they see them as the only solution.

As the expert group says:

“The State is entitled and, indeed, obliged to regulate and monitor the exercise of [the limited constitutional right to abortion] so as to ensure that the general constitutional prohibition on abortion is maintained.”

 As such, the expert group seems to envisage monitoring rather beyond what happens in Britain, saying:

“Any proposed system should be duly monitored. There is a need to keep records on the number of women who seek and who are given terminations and the medical reasons that gave rise to the treatment for clinical purposes. Statistics are also required to inform policy, as well as to ensure that the principles and requirements of the system are being upheld. The Review Panel system and its effectiveness should also be monitored. Finally, it is important to protect and suitably anonymise all records, to safeguard the privacy and identity of both patients and doctors.”

This, of course, is where it gets interesting. Monitoring in Britain is minimal, with doctors having to submit the most scanty of forms to explain why they believed abortions justified, their discretion being trusted. HSA4 forms, from which Britain’s abortion statistics are compiled, are sent to the Chief Medical Officer, are not required to give detailed justifications, instead merely requiring two doctors – except in emergencies – to certify their good faith opinion that the termination meets at least one and the same ground set out in the Act, given the information that they have about the woman’s circumstances. 

If there is evidence that a certifying doctor has not formed an opinion in good faith, then those performing the termination are not protected by the Act and may have potentially committed a criminal offence by terminating the pregnancy. The doctors involved may also be acting contrary to their professional duties.

HSA2 forms, which are required for Ground F and G abortions, requires doctors to certify that they were “of the opinion formed in good faith that it is/was necessary immediately to terminate the pregnancy”

The expert group, however, seem to think Irish doctors should be obliged to set forth the medical reasons that necessitated the treatment; what this might mean is not clear, but what is clear is that a mere box-ticking exercise would run contrary to the Constitution. 

This wouldn’t be unnecessary fussiness or prurience. It would simply be a case of the State acting in accord with its duty to vindicate and protect the rights of the unborn, as far as practicable. And what happens when the monitoring panel looks at a case where an abortion took place which the panel deems to be anything other than strictly necessary?

Well, as things stand, and as in Britain, abortion is a felony under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, for which a sentence of penal servitude for life can be imposed. Doctors can still be charged under this. The guidelines for filling out the HSA1 and HSA2 forms say:

“If there is evidence that a certifying doctor has not formed an opinion in good faith, then those performing the termination are not protected by the Act and may have potentially committed a criminal offence by terminating the pregnancy. The doctors involved may also be acting contrary to their professional duties.”

It seems to me that even with amendments, this principle could be upheld.

I think this would work. We legislate for X, but demand that decisions to abort be made by doctors, and doctors only, and with every single abortion – direct or indirect – to be scrutinised after the fact by a monitoring panel of medical practitioners. This wouldn’t happen so often that the medical profession in Ireland would be overwhelmed; if the British figures give us a real guideline on this, there’d only be one case a year where doctors would even have to consider whether a mother was in such danger of death that an abortion – as understood in the colloquial rather than strictly medical sense – would be the only possible way of saving the mother’s life. 

Doctors performing or authorising abortions should have to justify to the panel not merely what the risk was to the mother, but also why there was no other way of saving her life other than killing her child. 

And if the Constitution is to be taken seriously, the monitoring panel would be obliged, in cases where they believed doctors had performed abortions which were not clearly necessary, to have said doctors struck off and reported to the Director of Public Prosecutions. And as we’ve seen, it’s very hard to think of a situation where abortion would be necessary. It wasn’t necessary in the X case.

Would this guarantee that there’d never be abortions in Ireland? No, but just as abortion isn’t a magic wand, neither is the law magic. It would, however, guarantee that direct abortion would remain illegal.

_____________________________________________________________________________

* Yes, babies. Because that’s what the Medical Council guidelines say. As indeed the NHS in Britain tends to. Just like most expectant mothers, and other normal human beings.

** Finlay deemed the test to be passed in X because, 

"In my view, it is common sense that a threat of self-destruction such as is outlined in the evidence in this case, which the psychologist clearly believes to be a very real threat, cannot be monitored [in the sense in which a physical threat can] and that it is almost impossible to prevent self-destruction in a young girl in the situation in which this defendant is if she were to decide to carry out her threat of suicide."

 Justice Hederman, dissenting, thought this was nonsense. 

"If this young person without being pregnant had suicidal tendencies due to some other cause then nobody would doubt that the proper course would be to put her in such care and under such supervision as would counteract such tendency and do everything possible to prevent suicide. [...] This young girl clearly requires loving and sympathetic care and professional counselling and all the protection which the State agencies can provide or furnish."

The evidence considered by the Court showed Hederman to be right, and Finlay to be wrong, as it records the psychologist who dealt with X as saying under cross-examination that:

 "My recommendation would be she was not safe unless under supervision. I would have thought, given the state which I found her in, in-patent treatment would be essential. I don't think the parents can offer 24-hour supervision."

My italics, obviously. It 's worth noting that this evidence was never contested in the Supreme Court.

X would not be safe without in-patient treatment, said the only person who gave direct testimony as to her mental state; even though X's parents couldn't protect her, she would be safe under professional supervision. The psychologist's judgement on this was not contested. The court was aware that abortion was clearly not the only way of resolving this. There was another option.

It's just as well that the ECtHR reckons it inappropriate for constitutional courts to make medical decisions, given that Finlay's decision didn't comply with the test that he lay down. The Oireachtas has the job now of legislating to comply with that test. It should try to avoid Finlay's mistake.

Honouring a Europe at Peace

When the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize is presented to the European Union in Oslo this Monday it will no doubt be met with as much derision as was the original October announcement that the Union would be this year’s recipient.

Much of this scorn has been directed at the idea that the prize could be awarded to an institution rather than an individual, but this is hardly unprecedented; the Institute of International Law received the prize in 1904, the International Committee of the Red Cross has won it three times, and recent institutional laureates include Médecins Sans Frontières and the United Nations.

Others claim the decision discredits the prize altogether, insisting that the Union has only existed since 1993, and arguing that its main predecessor, the European Economic Community, was primarily a trading organisation, unworthy of being credited as the preeminent source of human rights and peace in Europe since the Second World War.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s press release announcing the decision comprehensively addressed these issues, however, explaining that, “The Union and its forerunners have for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.”

Democracy

Summarising the history of European integration, the committee cited how Germany and France have grown together since 1945, how the introduction of democracy was a precondition for the accession of Spain and Portugal to the EEC in the 1980s, and how the inclusion of countries from the former Eastern Bloc into the Union since the 1990s has buttressed human rights and democracy in those areas.

We too easily nowadays take for granted friendship between France and Germany, but this foundational relationship once seemed so profoundly improbable that in 1961 Margaret Thatcher held it forth as an ideal to which the British should aspire, saying, “France and Germany have attempted to sink their political differences and work for a united Europe. If France can do this so can we.”

Given France and Germany’s acrimonious history ever since Bismarck sought German unification through blood and iron, it was remarkable that they could stand together in the ash and rubble of the Second World War and seek to “make war unthinkable and materially impossible”, as French foreign minister Robert Schuman put it in May 1950.

The Schuman Declaration led to the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, with Italy and the Benelux countries joining France and Germany to pool the resources most necessary for warfare, effectively barring them from waging war against each other. The Treaty of Paris, establishing the ECSC, began by speaking of the need to work for peace worldwide, the importance of a stable Europe for this, and the necessity of building such a Europe through “concrete actions which create a real solidarity”.

These “concrete actions” can seem slow and even trivial – the comedian Eddie Izzard has described the EU as “the cutting edge of politics, in an incredibly boring way” – but they have built and sustained peace within the European Union and its forerunners over more than 60 years.

Nuclear umbrellaThis was long facilitated by NATO’s nuclear umbrella, and both the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights have helped ensure that European institutions operate in line with agreed standards of human rights, but neither of these required ordinary Europeans to work side-by-side, day-in-day-out on projects that bind us together.

It would be a shame if we in Ireland were to adopt the characteristically English error of putting the institutional cart before the aspirational horse by painting the European Union as an economic organisation with delusions of grandeur.

We miss the point of the ‘Common Market’ if we forget that it was an economic means directed towards social and political ends, aimed above all else at establishing and sustaining peace within Europe.

Security

Strange though it may now seem, Margaret Thatcher explained this with remarkable clarity in the lead-up to Britain’s 1975 European referendum, pointing out that “security is a matter not only of defence, but of working together in peacetime on economic issues which concern us and working closely together on trade, work and other social matters which affect all our peoples”.

Peace does not keep itself, and John Hume stressed the importance of Europe’s pragmatic, piecemeal, and indirect way of working for peace in his own 1998 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, observing that the “European Union is the best example in the history of the world of conflict resolution and it is the duty of everyone, particularly those who live in areas of conflict, to study how it was done and to apply its principles to their own conflict resolution”.

Visionaries

Hume went on to describe how the European visionaries, understanding the importance of recognising difference, created institutions which enabled and required people who differed from each other in all sorts of ways to work together in their common interest.

During Britain’s 1975 referendum campaign, Shirley Williams argued that the application of Catholic social teaching would be a major factor in Europe’s everyday political and economic life, and although this sadly hasn’t always been the case, it’s no accident that the European project sought from the first to embody such principles of CST as subsidiarity, solidarity, and the common good.

Several of Hume’s ‘visionaries’ - notably Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gaspari – were devout Catholics who aimed to create a peaceful and prosperous Europe, respectful of diversity and conscious of its Christian roots. Schuman, for instance, declared in 1958 while President of the European Parliamentary Assembly – now the European Parliament – that: “All the European countries are permeated by Christian civilisation. It is the soul of Europe which must be restored to it.”

Danger

The danger now, of course, as that we risk forgetting the point of European integration, and it is apt that the Nobel Committee ended its October press release on a note of admonition, recognising that the Union is currently experiencing economic turmoil which in turn is leading to social unrest.

Like so much else in Europe, the single currency was always intended as an economic means towards the political end of greater European unity. It is, therefore, all the more ironic that current efforts to preserve the Euro are placing such strains on the likes of Ireland, Spain, and most especially Greece that extremist parties are on the rise and the entire project looks more precarious than ever.

The Nobel Committee’s decision should be regarded not as an overdue and now irrelevant accolade, but as a stern warning to the politicians and peoples of Europe to remember why we originally chose to come together, and to remind us of what we stand to lose.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 6 December 2012.

Vigil for Life? I'm going with 7,000

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I should probably be feeling very proud of myself at the moment.

You remember how a couple of months back I strained my eyes to exhaustion by counting the marchers at the ‘March For Choice’, reaching a total of 850 or so marchers, which tied in pretty neatly with my initial estimate, a second estimate based on how much space Roman armies used to take up – because, after all, counting crowds is part of my training – and what people on the march had said about how much space the march took up, and the figures first reported by the Guards and the Irish Times, before they were pressurised into changing their numbers?

Well, somebody’s tried a similar kind of thing with Tuesday’s ‘Vigil for Life’, one Andrew Flood, writing on the Workers Solidarity Movement website, having valiantly taken up the gauntlet to count Tuesday's numbers, and, after dotting away on a 19-second video, having counted 1029 people at the vigil.

Andrew says he’s using the same method as me, but he’s not, and that should be obvious; I used three methods, none of which was without problems but all of which gave results in the same range, and for one of them I relied on information given by pro-choice friends who were on the march.

There is a superficial similarity between Andrew’s method and one of mine, as both of us took screenshots from a video and dotted heads as we counted them, but they’re substantively different. It’s ludicrous for him – or anyone else – to say we used the same system.

I counted based on video footage taken close up in daylight from a single inspection point near the end of the march, this being pretty close to best practice when counting moving crowds, whereas Andrew counted based on low-resolution video footage taken from a distance, at night, with such foreshortening that the rear two thirds of the vigil are basically indistinguishable.

This, you can be sure, is generally not how stationary crowds are counted. Still, I think Andrew deserves some credit for trying. It’s tedious work, and isn’t easy on the auld eyes.

1029? Bumped up generously to 2000? Sounds possible...

“Now obviously,” he says, “this is a broad estimate... it’s certainly not the 10,000 claimed by Youth Defence.  Not the 8,000 claimed by the Pro-Life Campaign and faithfully reported by RTE after some pressure.  It’s not even the 4,000 first reported by RTE.  The initial Garda estimate of 2,000 sounds more reasonable, allowing for a bit of coming and going and a few people being out of shot. Sprinkle on some wishful thinking and the fact that people had been visibly spread out to take up lots of space and you might get a reasonable Garda going for 2,000.”

On first reading this I was quite impressed. After knackering myself counting a crowd close-up in daylight, there was no way I’d have tried to do the same thing with a swooping long-range camera in the dark. Indeed, I’d looked at that same 19-second video before Andrew had done so, and assumed it wouldn’t be possible to count that crowd. It wouldn’t, I thought, even have been possible to estimate.

I’d seen somebody claiming there were only 300 there; I’d also heard that Youth Defence were claiming 10,000, which struck me as daft. 2,000 sounded quite plausible the way these things go. And, in truth, that’d not be a bad number, for the afternoon of a cold weekday, and everyone still at work. Still, I thought, I really wish people wouldn’t bump up their own numbers. 10,000 seemed almost as absurd as Ivana Bacik’s fantasy 5,000 at her March for Choice. Should’t we at least try to be honest?

And yet...

And then, after a few moments, I watched the 19-second video again, with the screen enlarged, freeze-framing as I went. I didn’t keep the stills, as with the one I’d worked from at the start of October. I just paused, and looked, and showed them to a (bored) friend, and very quickly concluded that this couldn’t be done.

Yes, I could see Andrew has taken four screenshots – as compared to the twenty I used for the ‘March for Choice’ – and dotted away, and done so ingeniously, applying red dots to people holding candles and green ones to people without them, but looking at this critically, I just didn’t think this was possible.

It was dark. The camera moves. It’s shot from a distance. There’s serious foreshortening with the crowd. The video’s low resolution.

Buses...

Still, it seemed an honest attempt at this, and I thought credit was due to him for trying. I only started to get uneasy when I heard somebody saying that about 2,000 people had come up to the vigil from around the country on buses they’d hired. Was that credible?

Well, a friend said that Youth Defence and the Pro Life Campaign people had told him that their local chapters had organised buses for 1,400 and 1,200 people respectively. That’d give 2,600 who’d come up in buses from the country, leaving aside people who’d made their own way there and those from Dublin and roundabout. Allowing for some double-counting, 2,000 sounded plausible.

What’s more, other data seemed to support this, as I heard of one person having personally arranged four buses from Galway, and of two buses having come from Monaghan, which has a lower population than all bar four Irish counties. More populous counties, you might think, would send more. Still, modern coaches take 55 people, while minibuses take 15-20, so even if we low-balled our figures, and assumed a coach and a small minibus from each county outside Dublin, that’d give us 2,170 people.

2,170 people excluding those who’d come under their own steam, and people from Dublin itself. Is a figure lower than 3,000 even remotely credible?

Common sense seemed to give serious grounds for doubting Andrew’s numbers anyway, so I decided to think about these figures again.

Crowd-counting 101...

The basic rule for crowd estimation is a straightforward equation based on space and density; it gets more complicated with moving crowds like ‘March for Choice’, but when a crowd’s standing still, as at a peaceful vigil, it’s pretty simple.

“There are two ways of estimating numbers,” says Nigel Stanley, head of TUC campaigns, on the BBC website, “One is drawn from having a rough idea in advance of the capacity of streets in the area where people gathered for the start of the march.”

To work this out you need precise maps with street measurements, multiplying width by length to get the area, which you’ll remember from school. Then you apply a rule of thumb that three people per square metre is comfortable and four is like a rock concert – the rule can vary between cultures, because Americans, for instance, tend to need lots of personal space, but this works well for British and Irish people. It’s important to keep in mind that density tends not to be uniform, and that crowds tend to be more compressed in some places, less compressed in others.

When dealing with marches you have to get stuck in and actually count samples and work out how long it takes people to pass certain inspection points – two or more for preference, but you do what you have to –  but with a stationary crowd you can and generally should just work with area and density.

So the professional crowd counters say, anyway, and a variant of that is my normal practice when dealing with battle accounts; it’s hard to read a field unless you’ve a good idea how many men fit on it.

Figuring out the perimeter...

So, how much space did the Vigil for Life take up? Well, if you’d selectively read the Twitter feed at the time, you could be forgiven for thinking there was hardly anybody there at all. 

“Looks like crowd at #vigil4life tiny fraction of crowd at any of the #savita protests despite national well funded mobilisation by bigots,” said @WSMIreland, adding “tricky to estimated size of #vigil4life as view obscured by expensive giant video screen & fancy PA but maybe a little over 300.”

“Tiny numbers at #vigil4life somewhat magnified by photos not revealing entire centre street is speakers platform,” it continued, proclaiming, “Pictures from scene suggest #vigil4life in hundreds @drivetimerte claims of 1000’s nuts,” and retweeting “They’re pipping cheers through speakers!! I'm at #vigil4life this is nuts. About 4-500 tops”.

Workers Solidarity Movement, then, seemed pretty sure at the time that there were only a few hundred there. Perhaps as few as 300. Certainly not the 1029 Andrew himself would subsequently count, let alone the 2,000 he was eventually to hazard, or the 5,000 Nell McCafferty – no pro-lifer she! – estimated on Facebook after having a gander on the spot.

@WSMIreland posted a few interesting pictures along the way. This one, taken from the Stephen’s Green end of Kildare Street is particularly good, as it shows the front end of the vigil, spilling forward from Molesworth Street across Kildare Street to the front gates of Leinster House.  

The WSMIreland caption to it is a bit baffling, though, decreeing “Pic showing just how small #vigil4life is compared to any for the #savita vigils held on Kildare st outside Dail.”

Well, it would show that if the Vigil had been along Kildare Street, but it wasn’t: it faced the Oireachtas buildings, rather than, say, the National Library and the National Museum, though it seems to have rather sprawled a bit on Kildare Street, if this rather colourful image is accurate. It’s almost as though WSM Ireland wanted to mislead people. Or just didn’t have a handle on what was going on. What’s your money on? Spectacular incompetence or egregious dishonesty? Either way, it doesn’t do a lot for their credibility on this issue.

I like this one too, which shows that the crowd stretched back to the junction of Molesworth Street and South Frederick Street. That’s useful. 

The Google Streetview version helps put things in perspective

A shame about the tweet linking to it saying “Picture showing spread out #vigil4life rally not even half filling Molesworth St. despite massive spending by bigots,” but there you have it.

I’m not quite sure why a determination to protect human life, and an unwillingness to have done unto other human beings what we would not like to have been done unto us – basic Golden Rule stuff, when you get down to it –  constitutes bigotry, but let’s leave that for now.

Well, now we have our crowd dimensions, if it not its density. The crowd on Molesworth Street stretched from wall to wall, taking up the footpaths rather than just the road, and as I’ve said, it went from the junction of South Frederick Street to the gates of Leinster House. Let’s pull it up on Google Maps, shall we?

And if we have the space, let's try for density...

I’m going to disregard the overspill sections on Kildare Street, because I have little idea how far the crowd spilled to left and right, and less idea how dense the crowd would have been where it wasn’t penned in my the edges of Molesworth Street. It’s best, I think, to treat it as a straightforward oblong.

Well, looking at the scale, and measuring it out like we used to do in geography class, it seems that the vigil must have taken up a space about 20 metres wide and 130 metres long, which – leaving aside the odd obstacle such as vans and screens – gives us 2,600 square metres. Now, according to the standard rule of thumb which sees three people comfortably together per square metre, this would give us 7,800 people at the vigil, or it would do if there were no obstacles.

If everybody was jammed together like at a gig, well, then we’d get 10,400, which supports Youth Defence’s claims, but I think we all know it wasn’t that crowded, so let’s stay with 7,800 tops, assuming a consistently comfortable crowd density.

But obviously we need to lower that because the area wasn’t entirely occupied by the crowd; looking at the aforementioned 19-second video, and a rather longer one made by Youth Defence, it looks as though they shared that 130 x 20 metre zone with a big screen, a speaking platform, and two or three vans.

None of these obstacles was all that big: if you look five seconds into the 19-second video, you’ll see that the platform can’t have been much more than 6 metres on any side, despite @WSMIreland’s claim that it took up the “entire centre street”. To be honest, looking at it in the Youth Defence video, I doubt any of its sides were more than 4 metres along, but let’s go mad and say that was 6 metres on each side, and go with, I dunno, 6 metres by four metres for the screen thing towards the back, and 5 metres by 2 metres for each of three vans. All told, that means 80 square metres need to be knocked off our total. 

2,520 square metres with three people per square metre at a consistently comfortable density, gives us 7,560. If the crowd had been packed like in a concert, that rises to 10,080 people, which ties in with Youth Defence’s claims, but judging by all the photos I’ve seen, and video footage too, I’m no more convinced by that now than I was on Tuesday; 10,000 has nice rhetorical value, but I think that figure’s wishful thinking more than anything.  7,560 sounds a lot more plausible to me, though it assumes an evenly packed crowd. 

Generally you should allow a 20pc margin of error on these things, according to the aforementioned Nigel Stanley, which suggests that there could have been anywhere between 6,000 and 9,000 people at the vigil.  Watson and Yip, however, reckon that if you’re confident on crowd density and area, you can apply a 10pc margin of error, which means somewhere between 6,804 and 8,316.

RTE’s eventual “several thousand” starts to sound reasonable when put that way, and the figure of 8,000, claimed by the Pro Life Campaign since Tuesday is certainly very possible. It’s not far off the mark, at any rate, and may in fact have been a conservative estimate.

6,000 sounds like a plausible minimum figure, then, but on balance, I’d go with 7,000, allowing that it might well have been rather more than that.

Foreshortening and density...

So how on earth can Andrew have gone so wrong, assuming he did so, which even the bus figures suggest he must have done?

An obvious starting point is that Andrew expected the numbers there to be low to begin with, as can be seen at how at 16:48 and 17:00 he’d retweeted the WSMIreland saying “Looks like crowd at #vigil4life tiny fraction of crowd at any of the #savita protests despite national well funded mobilisation by bigots” and  “tricky to estimated size of #vigil4life as view obscured by expensive giant video screen & fancy PA but maybe a little over 300 #savita”, before opining that the vigil’s organisers would have got a better turnout if they’d paid random people €50 each to attend.

Less than an hour or so later, in a thread which began with somebody else claiming that only about 300 were there, he said that pictures clearly showed that the crowd didn’t go halfway down Molesworth Street and were very spread out, with there being hundreds there, not thousands. At 19:33 he repeated the claim that Molesworth Street had been less than half full. Of course, even leaving aside the issue of density, it’s irrefutable that the crowd went as far as South Frederick Street, which is more than halfway down Molesworth Street.

Still, regardless of Andrew’s predisposition to number the vigil crowd in the hundreds, the video he worked from is of very poor quality, as I’ve said. It’s really hard to count from that, and when you contrast the video with the Google overhead shot, you start to see a massive problem. Look at the van which is on the border of his third and fourth panel. That van, which is three quarters of the way back in Andrew’s montage, was only a third of the way down the crowd-occupied portion of the street. I’ve marked its location on the overhead shot, locating its position with reference to buildings identifiable beside it. 

The video suffers from a terrible level of foreshortening, such that it’s about as problematic as a source can be, and appears to have led Andrew to say “really there is no way at all that 6,000 peopel were tucked away behind the white van.” 

Tucked away? Two thirds of the vigil’s length was behind that van! But then, Andrew doesn’t seem to have had any concept of that, claiming as he had done twice that evening that the vigil took up less than half of Molesworth Street, rather than about 60pc of it as well as a sizeable area on Kildare Street. 

Andrew’s count has 558 people in the three frames ahead of the van, and 471 in the frame behind it. Or, putting it another way, he has 558 people in the front third of the vigil, and 471 in the central and rear two thirds combined. Now that doesn’t sound very likely, does it?

Of course, it is just about conceivable that this could have happened, and if you work from a single source, as Andrew appears to have done, it can happen that you can get desperately misled into believing such highly improbable things. Single-source journalism, as the Irish Times seem to be discovering nowadays, is a mug’s game. The thing is, though, we don’t need to work from a single source. Here, for instance, is a still showing the back of the crowd, taken from that slightly longer Youth Defence video I mentioned earlier.

It’s a far better resolution than the video Andrew used, and gets in a lot closer, and shows us that the crowd was pretty dense at the back where Molesworth Street reaches South Frederick Street. Not crushed together like at the front rows at Slane, mind, but tightly packed for all that. Not surprising, really, given how cold it must have been.

Ah, but was it all like that? Perhaps it was dense at the very back, and maybe at the front, but nowhere else? Well, you know that van that Andrew used as a marker, the one that’s a third of the way back? Well, here’s a shot of the area around that.

We’re dealing with a pretty tight crowd, all told, pushed up right to the sides of the van. In fact, there seem to be about thirty people next to the van occupying as much space as the van. Again, it’s hard to count, given the darkness, but if we enlarge and squint and drop van-sized counting frames into position, it seems to back up the overall impression that this crowd is pretty compact, with roughly three people to every square metre. So far I’m not seeing anything to suggest that this was a sparse crowd.

It has to be said that Andrew, in his count, shows a screenshot where there’s what looks like a patch of spare ground. He presents this as evidence that the crowd was scattered. You can see it, about five seconds in. Watch the video. I could be very wrong, but I’m pretty sure this is the enormous “speakers’ platform” we keep hearing so much about. Yes, I know, not that enormous then; indeed, if you look at it on Andrew’s stitched together four-frame shot, you’ll see that it’s not that much wider than the speaker on it is tall!

In any case, it seems to be the only decent-sized gap in the crowd, and certainly shouldn’t be misrepresented as evidence that people at the vigil were standing metres apart.

Better to light a candle than curse the darkness...

Anyway, these last couple of screenshots from the video with higher resolution don’t merely give us an indication that the crowd density was high throughout. They also reveal that there were far more people at the vigil without candles than there were with candles. Seriously, try counting them. Take other screenshots from the Youth Defence video if you like, and if you can find good enough shots. You’ll find the same pattern across the vigil.

This is especially interesting, because Andrew’s count suggests that there were slightly more than twice as many people with candles as without. His figures give us 323 people without candles, as opposed to 706 with them. But it’s very clear from the better quality video footage that this ratio could hardly be more wrong.

Indeed, on the evening of the vigil, it seemed that @WSMIreland really didn’t grasp just how many people lacked candles, as can be seen in the caption to this picture saying “pic showing how #vigil4life organises have spread out crowd to make numbers appear greater at ground level”.

Leaving aside how poor quality this shot is, those dark patches clearly aren’t empty spaces. They’re people without candles, or people whose candles are blocked from the camera by their bodies.

That Andrew’s figures are hopelessly wrong can be seen by looking at that shot of the very end of the vigil. Andrew says he counted 167 people behind the screen, though having enlarged his pictures I can’t even see half that many dots. Do you reckon you can do better? On the clearer picture, I mean, not in Andrew’s foreshortened thing. Me, I gave up after 300, thinking that life is too short for this sort of thing.

That said, given that life is too short anyway, I’m glad more than 6,000 people took to Dublin’s dark streets on a cold weekday evening to say that we shouldn’t be cutting it short for others.

I'm going to let Andrew wrap it up, given he inspired this post. Very sensibly, he includes an all-important caveat in his post:

“A final word.  I actually don’t think the numbers mobilised have any importance as to whether women should have access to abortion in this country.  My position is simple, if one women wants an abortion she should be able to access it regardless of how large or small a majority of people agree with her choice. That is what the pro-choice position means - the choice is for each women and not anyone else to make.  However the political reality is that the arguments about numbers are going to be used to scare cowardly politicians so I’m not inclined to allow the crazy no abortion whatsoever forces that represent no more than 15% of the population these days away with anything.”

I half-agree with him. I don’t agree with his conclusions, or with his belief that only 15pc of the population are opposed to abortion, but I do agree with this: this isn’t a matter of numbers. Either we believe human life matters, and that without a right to life we can’t have any other rights, and that we shouldn’t deny others the opportunities we’ve had ourselves, or we don’t. Ultimately it comes down to that.

Like the girls said.

Holding Anglicanism Together

Some years ago in Brighton I sheltered from a storm in the porch of an enormous Anglican church, locally reputed to have been built to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark. As I marvelled at how the church interior looked indistinguishable from a Catholic church, a lady whispered that girls wouldn’t normally act as servers there.

“We’re an A, B, and C church,” she said, adding, “It means we don’t have women priests, and we stick to the old traditions.” I asked what A, B, and C stood for, and she explained, “Well, it just means that we stick to the old traditions, really. If it’s not broken, why fix it?”

The following day, Anglican friends at a Cambridge theological college explained that ‘A, B, and C’ were resolutions passed by the Church of England’s General Synod in the aftermath of the 1992 decision that women could be ordained to Anglican ministry. The resolutions allowed parochial councils to refuse to have women serve as priests in their parishes and even to request that their pastoral and sacramental care be reserved for a bishop who had never ordained women; parishes whose diocesan bishops had ordained women could seek special ‘flying bishops’ to care for them.

Women clergy

The Church of England’s struggles over women clergy are in a defining phase at the moment, so it seemed apt that the first thing Justin Welby, bishop of Durham, should have posted on Twitter after the Prime Minister’s office announced his selection as the next Archbishop of Canterbury was, “Just heard of protest call to Lambeth at appointment of a woman as ABC. Am spelt Justin, not Justine. No agenda, just a matter of fact.”

That alone signalled that the Eton- and Cambridge-educated erstwhile oil executive would be an archbishop for a soundbite age, possessed of a lightness of touch and a gift for brevity that has often seemed to elude Rowan Williams, whose ruminative and nuanced style has struck many as more suited to academic debate than to ecclesial leadership.

Divisions

Rowan’s time in office has been marked by divisions over women bishops and gay clergy, such that some have characterised the last decade as a disaster for the Church of England. This seems unfair; Rowan is clearly a brave, intelligent, and genuinely holy man who has made a point of speaking up for Britain’s most vulnerable and engaging seriously with public opponents of Christianity whilst trying to hold together a fractious and disparate Anglican Communion, despite not having any real executive power.

Justin Welby may have more luck, not least because his background makes it difficult to pigeonhole him as a partisan of any particular Anglican faction. An Evangelical by background, Welby worshipped and was a lay leader during the 1980s at Holy Trinity Brompton, mothership of the Alpha Course and totemic headquarters for the most dynamic and youthful movement within the Church of England. His spirituality has broadened since then, however, and nowadays his spiritual director is a Benedictine monk, which should give comfort to those Anglicans of an Anglo-Catholic persuasion.

Welby’s Catholic connections shouldn’t give false hope to those who look forward to a restoration of unity between the Church of England and the Catholic Church any time soon, however. For the last 20 years, ever since Welby was ordained a deacon, the issue of women priests has been an insuperable obstacle to unity, not merely between Canterbury and Rome, but between the Church of England and the various Orthodox Churches.

Vote

The debate within the Church of England about women clergy has moved on from whether women can be ordained priests to whether they can be ordained bishops, and though the debate has been acrimonious for some time, Welby has been firm in his support for women bishops. The General Synod, the Church of England’s parliament, votes this week on whether women should be allowed become bishops, and Welby has unambiguously stated that “I will be voting in favour, and join my voice to many others in urging the synod to go forward with this change.”

Although the measure is widely supported within the Church of England, there is no guarantee that this measure shall pass; resolute opponents of the change are not numerous enough to block the proposals in any of three ‘houses’ – bishops, clergy, or laity – of the synod, but it is quite possible that those who believe the bishops’ proposal utterly unacceptable may be have their numbers bolstered by those who believe it hopelessly inadequate.

Traditionalist

In July the synod rejected legislation which would have given traditionalist parishes significant exemptions from serving under a woman bishop, similar to the current ‘A,B, and C’ arrangement regarding women priests, notably an allowance for traditionalist parishes to request a male bishop who shared their beliefs about the ordination of women. The proposal would give women bishops more control in selecting ‘flying bishops’ for parishes in their dioceses, and would limit the obligations they would be obliged to respect.

For traditionalists, this goes too far, imposing a vision of the Church upon them which they feel is theologically unsustainable; for liberals, it doesn’t go nearly far enough, enshrining discrimination in the law of the Church. Despite their disagreements, it is all too easy to imagine these groups combining to form the necessary ‘blocking third’ to prevent synod from legislating for this. Should this happen it could be as many as seven years before the issue is voted on again.

Whatever happens, the pragmatic Welby seems prepared for such deep divisions to persist in the Church of England, the Anglican Communion as a whole, and even the general Christian world, saying recently that he did not want Christians to agree with one another, “but to love one another and to demonstrate to the world around us a better way of disagreeing”.

Constructive 

Certainly, Welby seems a man well used to disagreeing in constructive and loving ways. After becoming a canon at Coventry Cathedral in 2002, he became co-director of the International Centre for Reconciliation, helping mediate and build peace in war-torn regions around the world, notably in Africa where he once narrowly avoided being kidnapped. 

Negotiation and conflict resolution skills honed in such dramatic environments could prove invaluable in his new job, and his experience in Africa will give him credibility as he tries to hold the Anglican Communion together.

Henry Kissinger is often said to have asked: “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” It might just be that in Justin Welby, the Pope will know exactly who to call if he wants to call the Anglican Communion.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 22 November 2012.