One was that the people pushing for the amendment were motivated by a deep belief that Ireland was being infiltrated from without by foreign forces who, as the pope had warned in 1979, saw the corruption of its innocence as a great prize. Abortion was a cipher for the nexus of evils that included contraception, homosexuality and extramarital sex. The other was that this paranoid vision, based on a denial of the realities of the way Irish people were actually living their lives, would undoubtedly triumph. It offered a refuge from the psychic disturbance of the apparent failure of the
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