IT was in County Roscommon four months ago when I first had a presentiment that the last ties binding Ireland to its ancient heritage of humanity were about to be loosened. The Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, had announced that a referendum would take place on whether to repeal the 8th amendment of the Irish constitution, the one that accorded equal status to the life of an unborn child with that of its mother. Only in extreme circumstances, including a genuine threat to the life of the mother, could an abortion take place.

In the decades that have elapsed since this was enshrined in 1983 Ireland has been portrayed by the hunting packs of the liberal elites as a superstitious and backward state. In fact, the 8th amendment was an enlightened and compassionate measure guaranteeing the human rights of society’s most vulnerable human beings: children growing within the womb. Though much of this anger and invective was sincere, a great deal of it was also thinly-concealed hatred of Christianity and an anti-Irish racism similar to that recently espoused by some high-profile Scottish politicians.

I had chosen to travel to County Roscommon because in the referendum three years earlier on same-sex marriage this most religiously conservative of Ireland’s 26 counties had alone voted in favour, albeit by the slimmest of margins, to keep the status quo. In February I spoke with around a dozen women most, if not all, practising Catholics. All of them, by degrees, stated that they would be voting to repeal the 8th; all of them stated that they were moved to do so by the most compassionate and human of ideals. Each of them cited the cases of those tormented souls who felt they had no option but to cross the channel to have their unborn child aborted. I predicted then that the 8th amendment would be repealed by a wide margin and so it came to pass in last week’s referendum.

Whatever chance that the basic human rights of unborn children might continue to be upheld would rely on a sensitive, non-judgmental and subtle campaign by those leading the pro-life side. Regrettably, very few pro-life activists seem to know the meaning of the words sensitive and non-judgmental. The pro-life cause in the UK has been weakened for decades by having been led by a grotesque assortment of fundamentalist, ultra-montane characters who see issues only through the narrow prism of their sheltered and self-anointed existences. The width of their colour spectrum extends from black to white with nothing inbetween and always tending towards the dark.

In Scotland the main pro-life agency, SPUC, thinks it’s a good idea to harry women seeking abortions outside hospitals such as Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth. These candle-lit ‘vigils’ held after dark amidst myriad placards carry a sense of malevolence redolent of Mississippi in the early 1960s. There is no sense of compassion or empathy for these women, many of whom have agonised over their decision to have an abortion. There is no inquiry into the circumstances forcing many vulnerable women into this position; no understanding of the social deprivation or domestic violence which makes these women seek such a desperate end for the human beings they are carrying. How many pro-life activists and censorious clergy would give a fig for the future lives of those unborn children if they were permitted to live? If they are unwilling to work just as hard to relieve the poverty and inequality and violence that drives many women to the abortion clinic then they have no right to shout and preach.

Throughout Ireland, too, it seems the antediluvian and discredited shock tactics of the 1970s were allowed to disfigure the pro-life campaign. These included wild propaganda pictures of the bloody aftermath of abortions which do little more than sicken those many who will have known the pain of friends and relatives who have had an abortion and drive them into the opposing camp. The presence of the Catholic Church in the midst of it all was also a key factor.

In Ireland, as in Scotland, the church has betrayed generations of its faithful with decades of widespread clerical sex abuse followed by a mass cover-up and a continuing refusal adequately to offer proper financial redress. All of this was at last admitted by Pope Francis last week when he paid tribute to victims of abuse in Chile for their “valiant perseverance” in denouncing abuse “even against all hopes or attempts to discredit them”. When your cause relies so much on this broken and untrustworthy institution then it is probably already doomed to failure.

One distressing aspect of the Irish 8th amendment struggle was the revelation that more than 80 Irish women had abortions in two years on the grounds that their unborn babies would have Down syndrome, while another six abortions were carried on women who were told their unborn child would have spina bifida. The repeal of the 8th means that life for these most vulnerable of the vulnerable will become more fragile still. Iceland is already on course to become the first country to screen out Downs while Denmark is not far behind.

As ever, those of us who believe that this is fundamentally a human rights issue and not one of religion or faith have been largely cowed into silence since the referendum result. In modern Scotland, and now in Ireland, to believe in the fundamental right to life of an unborn child is to risk being accused of fanaticism and – the worst sin of all – anti-feminism. When you attempt to ask people to consider that there is another life at stake deserving of equal status to its mother the common response is: “It’s not a human being”. Well, what is it then, a Martian? Another response is that the unborn child is incapable of independent living. The implications of such a response for those with mental or physical disabilities are chilling.

The response to the referendum result among some who sincerely oppose the view that the child in the womb is fully human and therefore deserving of our protection was one of restraint and respect. Among too many others, though, the sense of glee that greeted this leap towards a culture of death was utterly sickening.