Mr Justice Konan Keane's blunt indictment is correct when he criticises the "governmental and legislative inertia" on abortion. The task of the courts is to interpret and apply the law but it is the responsibility of legislators to frame the laws of this State. It is a responsibility that they have shirked since the X case ruling in 1992 made abortion permissible in certain circumstances. The fact that the Director of Public Prosecutions may consider a prosecution against a Dublin clinic where an abortion allegedly took place under legislation framed over a century ago - the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act - completes the paradox.
None of the main parties has much to say in response to Judge Keane's comments. With Fianna Fail already in some disarray on the issue, it seems clear that the Government will not make any move to introduce legislation, this side of a general election. In the polite language of Leinster House, the abortion issue has been `parked' it is still, clearly, too difficult, too problematic and too dangerous for our legislators. All the main parties now appear at one on other aspects of the so-called liberal agenda. Abortion, it seems, remains the final frontier.
The current legal and political ambiguity is a classic example of that discredited species, the Irish `solution'. It may be that at least 5,000 Irish women travel to Britain every year for abortions, it may be that many of these women are driven to their course of action by immense psychological and practical pressures. As a society, we prefer to turn our head away and to export our abortion problem. It is not a position which reflects much credit on an independent and supposedly mature state.
The current campaign for another referendum to outlaw abortion makes little political or legal sense. Although the parameters of existing law are vague and unclear, the combined effects of the X case judgment and the 1995 ruling on the Abortion Information Bill is to make it extremely difficult to frame a constitutional amendment that will prohibit abortion in all circumstances - while containing sufficient safeguards to protect the life of the mother. The one truly independent group to examine the issue, the Constitution Review Group, concluded that legislation was the only way.
The Fianna Fail leader, Mr Ahern, might have forcefully reminded his colleagues of this during the week. Instead, he initially ducked on the issue and allowed the pro-referendum grouping within his own party to seize the initiative. Mr Ahern, in fairness recovered some lost ground in the latter part of this week and again asserted his authority but it is clear that the party is riven, with deeply-entrenched positions on all sides of the argument. Nor is that condition confined to Fianna Fail. Views which are no less polarised could be found just as readily within the Fine Gael fold.
For its part the Government may have been more politically adroit in its approach but that should not disguise the reality that it too is running scared on the abortion issue.
In the longer term, after the election has come and gone, it is to be hoped that Fianna Fail's difficulties this past week will not permanently block progress towards a legislative solution. On past evidence, this is probably a naive view.