Labour Party’s David Thornley, told the Dáil that ‘There are absolutely no circumstances in which I would vote for abortion. I regard it as murder…’4 Yet here, too, there was the Irish solution to an Irish problem: distance and silence. The unspoken and unspeakable compact was that Irish women would have their abortions elsewhere, mostly in England. And, when they came back, they would not talk about it. This had obviously gone on for a long time.
