On Thursday night, 21 years since the Irish supreme court ruled that a suicidal teenage rape victim had the right to an abortion, the government finally passed abortion legislation. Sorry, I mean it passed "protection of life during pregnancy" legislation. There is no abortion bill. Oh, and the bill defines unborn life as a fertilised egg from implantation to birth. And, no, for those of you who sense a slight imbalance in the framing of the law, the government has no plans to discuss a "protection of choice during pregnancy" bill any time soon.
The new law fails to account for cases of rape or incest, for cases where the health (as opposed to the life) of a woman is at risk, or for cases of fatal foetal abnormality. As the abortion rights campaign points out, the wording is so restrictive that it's doubtful whether it would enable a suicidal teenage rape victim to access abortion at all.
On Wednesday at 3am in Dáil Éireann, during the marathon debate that passed the historic bill, a Fine Gael teachta dála (member of parliament), Tom Barry, pulled a female colleague, Áine Collins, on to his lap. Watch the video. Disturbing or your money back. The next day, minister for jobs Richard Bruton requested that this inappropriate incident not be allowed to sidetrack the crucial work under way in Leinster House. In other words: would ye ever shut up?
But I can't shut up. Because #lapgate – as it has come to be (over) affectionately known – is the Irish abortion debate. I can't think of a gesture that more perfectly represents the relationship between women's bodies and the Irish body politic.
First and foremost, #lapgate is high farce. It is so completely farcical for a female TD to be groped by a male colleague during a debate on reproductive rights that it's hard to believe the incident hadn't been scripted. It's as farcical as the "Rosary Crusade For Ireland" protest outside the Dáil, which is itself so farcical that the co-writer of Father Ted has given pro-choice campaigners full permission to use as many Craggy Island references as they need. It's as farcical as the self-same TD Tom Barry publicly explaining that he's voting for the bill in order to prevent women accessing terminations, and, in this vein, writing to Cardinal Seán Brady to make sure he won't be excommunicated. In the meantime, 4,000 women annually, for myriad reasons – some personal, some practical, some painful – travel to the UK to access the abortions that they need.
The reaction from the gents in the chamber is symbolic too. Watch the two men standing directly in front of TD Barry. Oh they see all right, but they pass no remarks. Nothing going on here. Business as usual.
And Fine Gael's reflex reaction to #lapgate? It was "silly". As general secretary Tom Curran explains, before party spokespeople took the time to watch the video or, presumably, to talk to the woman involved, their "instinctive characterisation" of the incident was "horseplay involving two people". When it became apparent that TD Barry's oh-so subtle advances had not been welcome, they condescended to deem the incident unacceptable. But it's the gut reaction I'm interested in, because it too is frighteningly symbolic.
Declaring an incident where a male colleague pulls a female colleague onto his lap "silly horseplay" displays the same lack of ability to walk in women's shoes as does the laughably restrictive abortion legislation passed on Friday. Less than one in six TDs are female – a fact which, as any woman operating within a predominantly male system will tell you, creates pressure to be taken seriously. And I don't know TD Collins, but my first feeling on watching the video was not "Horseplay! Sure wasn't she mad up for a bit of an auld impromptu lapdance"; it was "Jesus, she must be mortified." Because I am capable of basic human empathy.
This blindness to what it is like to be a woman – to the feeling of being outnumbered 5 to 1 by male colleagues, or to the realities of existing in a body that gets pregnant – defines both the new Irish pregnancy legislation and patriarchal attitudes to women in the Republic more generally. There are people in Ireland who believe that, if granted access to safe, legal abortion, women would terminate in order to look good on the beach.
The reaction of a number of female TDs to #lapgate was to say that there needs to be more women in Irish politics. This solution might also be applied to Irish abortion rights. If more than 15% of our TDs were female, there would likely be people in the house who actually know what it is like to need a termination, and can express that reality in human terms. But while women's experiences of sexism in politics are dismissed as silly, and while the reproductive decisions Irish women make are vilified and criminalised, this solution remains circular. In a country where the choices that thousands of women make in relation to their bodies are illegal, what real respect can there be for women – immoral, criminal creatures – in the body politic? Without respect, we can't gain representation: the politics of our bodies are reduced to horseplay, and power is left in the patriarchy's lap.