Despite threats of excommunication from cardinals and bishops, a privately devout Catholic prime minister is on the verge of introducing limited abortion into Ireland for the first time in the republic's existence resulting in a minister leaving his government on Thursday for opposing the reform on grounds of conscience.
Enda Kenny and his coalition government are on course to push through the protection of life in pregnancy bill, which will allow for abortions only when a woman's life is under threat if her pregnancy continues or if she is suicidal.
The drive towards ending Ireland's near total ban on abortion created its first ministerial casualty after the junior European minister, Lucinda Creighton, was expelled from the Fine Gael parliamentary party.
Creighton voted against the abortion law reform and is now expected to lose her ministerial job as well. On her way out of the Dáil, Creighton shook the taoiseach's hand.
But the legislation passing through the Dáil will not stop the annual abortion trail from Ireland to Britain.
According to Irish department of health figures released on the same day as the debate, about 4,000 Irish women travelled to British hospitals and clinics to terminate their pregnancies. They included 124 who were under the age of 18.
The new law does not include their cases which include women who were raped, meaning that this grim traffic across the Irish Sea will continue.
Mara Clarke, director of the London-based Abortion Support Network, a charity that raises money to help women afford the £400-£2,000 it costs to travel and pay privately for an abortion in England, condemned the restriction on an Irish woman's right to choose.
"Given that the Irish government has now had more than 22 years to legislate on the X case, I'm not sure what the holdup is but then I'm not an expert on Irish abortion law. I am an expert in what happens to women when access to abortion is restricted.
"Even if this law is enacted, only a very, very small percentage of women who need abortions will be able to access them in Ireland. Women pregnant as result of rape, women with fatal foetal anomalies, couples who simply can't afford to care for a (or in most cases, another) child, will still be left behind.
This week alone, Abortion Support Network has heard from a woman whose abusive husband hid her passport so she could not travel for an abortion, a woman who considered crashing her car to induce a miscarriage and a couple whose wanted pregnancy had catastrophic foetal anomalies. "These were only three of the 10 women who contacted us last week," Clarke said.
The Terminations for Medical Reasons – the campaign group for women who seek abortions because their babies will die if their pregnancies continue – accused the government of lacking courage to include their cases in the legislation.
"We are enormously saddened that their decision means that it could now be years before this is changed in legislation. With each week that passes, more grieving women and couples will have to leave Ireland to receive medical care," a TMFR spokesperson said.
The Dublin high court earlier on Thursday refused to grant an injunction aimed at stopping provisions of the protection of life during pregnancy bill being voted into law, just hours before the matter returned to the Dáil.
Kenny has described himself as a Catholic but "not a Catholic taoiseach" .
Regardless of the criticism of the way the bill has gone through the Dáil, it appears highly likely it will be made into law. The government easily won the first two Dáil votes on amendments to the bill. The first was on amendment 8, which effectively called for the deletion of the suicide clause. The second vote was on amendment 10, which deals with fatal foetal abnormalities. Both were defeated with heavy majorities.
Although critics from the left have accused the Fine Gael and Labour parties of not going far enough, the expected passing of the bill does mark another defeat for the temporal power of the Catholic church in Ireland.
The outgoing leader of Ireland's Catholics, Dr Sean Brady, held out the possibility in May of banning Irish parliamentarians from receiving holy communion if they voted for the bill. However, Brady's own influence has been severely dented after he was caught up in the deluge of paedophile priest scandals that have undermined the church's authority in Ireland.
Brady was forced to issue a public apology last year to a man who revealed that the future cardinal failed to report to police and parents a list of children who were being abused by the notorious paedophile priest, Fr Brendan Smyth.
Brady was the Catholic church's notetaker during a secret meeting in 1975 between Brendan Boland, then 14, and senior clerics after the boy made allegations about Smyth.
Although accompanied by his father to the meeting, Boland's parent was not allowed into the hearing between senior clergy and the boy. Smyth went on to abuse hundreds of children in orphanages, parishes and hospitals both in Ireland and abroad.
Since the exposure of dozens of clerical sex abusers and revelations that Catholic hierarchy covered up various scandals, Irish politicians have been less fearful of being denounced from the pulpit, which in the past would have been fatal for their careers in one of the Vatican's most favoured and loyal nations.
The Fine Gael-Labour government though was not so much prompted by a new sense of defiance of the Catholic clergy and Rome but rather a series of court cases in Dublin and Strasbourg.
In 1992, the Irish supreme court ruled abortion should be allowed if there was a threat to mother's life including suicide. The ruling was connected to the case taken by a 14-year-old rape victim who became pregnant and was refused permission to travel outside the republic for an abortion. Twenty one years later, that ruling will now be enshrined in Irish law.
Ireland was also under pressure after a European court of human rights ruling that a woman in remission with cancer was discriminated against because she was forced to travel overseas for a termination.
