‘The Minister’ by Patrick Fitzgerald

The Minister is surprised to find that today, her last constituency clinic before the referendum, it’s quiet. Her father might have conducted just such an uneventful clinic forty years ago. Planning permission applications, medical card appeals, a dispute over a boundary, and a teacher who requests a Dáil tour for her class. Then finally, just as she is thinking of leaving, an old woman she recognizes but whose name she can’t recall. The Minister is briefly sorry, when she sees her, to have taken the position she has on the referendum. Why it’s usually elderly women who are drawn to campaign, to phone, to harangue against abortion, the Minister has never understood. Our unraveling procreative stuff, she thinks, must call to us. Maybe in regret. Maybe in triumph or purity or something else. Even those who are old now, she thinks, are still young enough to have chosen, to have travelled or to have stayed. One way or the other, they are young enough to sit, huddled in overcoats, years later in constituency clinics.

But the old woman is here on her own business. She has been paying her mortgage, she tells the Minister, since 1972. A forty-eight year term. The Minister nods. In those days, people who had managed somehow to obtain a plot of land could sell it to the county council for a nominal sum. The Minister is searching her memory for traces of the woman. O’Connor, she thinks, at last. From Tomnahealy. Widowed young. When the land was somehow obtained, the council then built a house, to be repaid at a very low rate over a very long term. It was the sort of provision by which the Minister’s party, in one of its earlier manifestations, established a massive and enduring electoral appeal. The woman wants to pay the balance off now. Three years early. She doesn’t want to leave a mess behind her. Is this allowed?

An entire culture built on somehow, the Minister thinks, wondering at the depths of the word, at a widow’s precarious existence fifty years ago.

‘Mrs O’Connor,’ she begins, taking a chance on the name. The old woman does not contradict her. The Minister remembers her father’s proudest boast – that he never had to ask a constituent their name.

‘It’s not technically possible,’ the Minister says. ‘You know you have to be there forty-eight years before the balance can be paid in full –’

‘That’s 2020,’ the old woman interrupts. ‘Forty-eight years is 2020. I’m eighty-seven. We might as well say 2050. The way I’ve been feeling lately, these peepers will be shut by 2020.’

There isn’t much the Minister can do. Nonetheless, she goes to a filing cabinet in the corner of the office. Of the nearly thirteen thousand forms and declarations relating to the centralised and local government of Ireland, she has at least three quarters in her constituency office. She tells the old woman that, of course, she will write a letter in support of her application. The old woman had two daughters, the Minister remembers. One of them died about twenty years ago. Nora and Mary. She will not hazard a guess as to the surviving daughter’s name.

‘Your father,’ she tells the Minister, ‘helped me with planning permission, originally. Before the council would build it for you, you had to arrange all that yourself.’

Somehow. ’Different times,’ the Minister says. ‘You could still ring the county manager and maybe get some help. If he liked your colour.’

The Minister takes the old woman’s arm as she stands, and walks her to the door. There is a solidity to her; she is a thing that has been precisely reduced. Her hair, recently cut and blow-dried, is beyond white. As though advanced old age is a very brief form of rejuvenation.

‘Speaking of your father,’ Mrs O’Connor says, ‘I was very surprised to hear you are voting the way you are.’

The Minister can hardly conceal her weariness. She feels a kind of duty to herself not to conceal it. ‘Will you be voting, Mrs O’Connor?’ she asks, archly. The old woman notes and deflects the Minister’s tone with a downward glance. ‘Oh, I will,’ she says. ‘There seems to be a vote now on something every six weeks in this country,’ she says, ‘but I’ll vote on Friday.’

‘Good,’ the Minister says. ’Important to have your voice heard.’

The old woman stops and looks at her. ‘If anything in this world is a sin, Minister,’ she says, ‘then that is a sin.’

The Minister tells her, as she has told so many others over the past few weeks, that she wants only to bring the law into line with the best medical practice to protect the health of the mother. With a basic humanity.

‘I’m no more in favour of unrestricted abortion access than you are, Mrs O’Connor,’ she says, ‘let me assure you. I want simply to close an anomaly in the law. But having said that,’ she continues, ‘I don’t like to be too judgemental. I try very hard to see both sides.’

‘Don’t try too hard,’ the old woman says, coolly. ‘Don’t try at all.’

‘The changes,’ the Minister says, ‘will only affect the narrowest section of pregnant women. The recent unfortunate cases have shown –’

‘How in the hell,’ Mrs O’Connor interrupts, with a triumphant shine about her, ‘did you make it to what, nearly forty years of age, and know so little about human beings? You surely know there’s an element in Dáil Éireann who’ll use that poor woman’s death to bring in abortion on demand in Ireland at any cost. I didn’t think you were one of their helpers.’

Abortion on Demand, the Minister almost says the words aloud. There isn’t a neutral word to be found. She was mocked in the media recently for her exasperated use of the term life form.

‘I can’t understand,’ the old woman says, ‘how anyone could be for allowing it.’ She smiles a half-smile. ‘Sure to hell with consequences,’ she says.

Life form. Foetus. The unborn. The Minister thinks of her flight to England for an abortion four years ago. Of how, for most of the trip, she found herself considering the Irish word for abortion. An ginmhilleadh. The Irish was more blunt. The word seeking to carry the description and the judgement. During this campaign she’s found it easier to deal with people, like her opponent on an RTÉ radio debate last week, who attacked her for not seeing the right to have an abortion sufficiently as a human right, for not voting in favour of a more liberal regime. People like Mrs O’Connor, who claim to map the territories of sin, have caused her more disquiet. Even anger. But now, she’s simply glad the referendum has almost arrived.

‘Nobody ever really changes their minds, do they?’

Mrs O’Connor pensively taps her square little front teeth with a square little fingernail. ‘No,’ she says. ‘More’s the pity.’

‘I’m going to visit my father now, actually,’ the Minister tells her. ‘He will be glad to know that you’re out and about and looking so well. Oh, and I’ll send you on that letter of support for your application.’

The old woman shrugs. ‘If I only felt as well as I look,’ she says. ‘Remember me to him. And Peggy O’Gorman is my name, Minister, when you’re posting it on.’

Her father won’t notice that she hasn’t visited him. In any case she is never very sorry to avoid the nursing home. Despite the money that she and her brother pay for his care at Portview House, there is a certain odour of which she cannot rid herself for hours after a visit. Or maybe a disconcerting combination of odours. Vegetables boiled to sweet pulp, intimate bodily rot, with astringent cleaning fluids making everything worse, she thinks. Amidst all this her father sits, his features slowly whitening and lengthening, carved into simplicity by a stroke eight years ago.

She drives instead to Ballymoney. The land is now farmed by her brother. Parking a short distance from the house, she walks back along the lane to the woods her father planted thirty years ago, in memory of his late wife. The Minister, a solicitor, was an obvious candidate to follow her father into politics. He was a backbench politician – comfortable there. A maverick who would only be outspoken when it cost him no votes. A man who could stand in the Dáil and say that where single mothers were concerned, there was usually a man on the scene.

Some of her brother’s cattle are in a field adjoining the woods. Belted Galloways – a breed suited to sandy soil, to the seaside air at Ballymoney. It was her favourite thing, as a child, to tend to these cattle with her father.

She hears Mrs O’Connor, or Mrs O’Gorman. To hell with the consequences.

She hears her opponent on the radio debate last week. Don’t tell me, please don’t tell me, that women who do this don’t live with the consequences.

She hears her own narrow, government-line, lawyerly, retort. For no other criminal act would having to live with the consequences be introduced as some sort of mitigating factor. We are trying to ensure that as far as is practicable, the mother and child have equal protection – except in those rare ...

The cattle move towards the fence, their wariness softens into indifference. What would the old woman know about her father’s voting intentions, the Minister wonders, other than what he might have felt wise to say in public. When she agreed to the Taoiseach’s request that she run for her father’s vacant seat, it was with one condition. ‘As long,’ she said, ‘as I do not have to settle for simply being a colourful character.’

Abortions were common in farming, she discovered as a child, in the raising of livestock. Not all castrations of bulls were successful, her father once said to her. Her widowed father, who left every aspect of his daughter’s adolescence to the care of his sister, could nonetheless discuss the minutiae of bovine anatomy without the slightest embarrassment. Cows sometimes became pregnant with twins, for instance, which was too grave a risk to their health.

The Minister is glad that the referendum is almost here. She has avoided the worst of it. Perhaps people speculate on her past. She feels that they must. Whether she has or she hasn’t.

She is glad that she had to travel to England. Whether she was glad at the time she does not know – only that she is glad now. And she is glad that she has taken the narrow position she has taken on abortion. Glad too, if it comes to that, to perpetuate a hypocrisy. What she regrets is not being more frank with her opponent on the radio last week.

We must live in a world, the Minister thinks, where women do this thing and do not live with the consequences. There must be women who undertake it lightly. If we live in a world of grace then we must also live in a world of unmourned abortions. And there is such a thing as grace, she thinks. She remembers the flight home from England. The quick realization, gazing down upon a false, tinfoil sea that her trip was no different in substance from the pilgrimages to Lough Derg that her mother and aunt had made many years ago. That this distance, this undertaking, this travel and discomfort, was a kind of solemnizing. A guarantee of seriousness and agency and care.

Of course, no one could say that on national radio. And one’s particular feelings were one’s particular feelings. In strange form, however, they did see the light of day. They were somehow meshed, pulverized, brought into reality through the polling booth, forced through a gate saying Yes or No.

The cows used to panic when the abortifacient was introduced to their systems. A snorting, panicked, hollow lowing when the injections were given by the vet, Dr O’Byrne. As a girl, she imagined a cold mist seeping into them. And one day, her father’s remark to the vet. ‘A healthy dose of this stuff in the water generally,’ he said, ‘would do no great harm, every now and again. Does these girls no harm, anyway.’ He patted the rump of the cow. The first time in all those years that he felt strange to her. Something stirred in her that she could not articulate for many years; something keen and absurd and precise, a humiliated sisterhood with these animals.

She touches the forehead of the cow nearest her. It retreats suddenly, skittishly. Don’t tell me, the Minister thinks, that from you I learned everything. How exposed and vulnerable seem the angled tendons and jutting knuckles of bone in its legs. But maybe only vulnerable, she thinks, if you fail to see it as a species that evolved to back away quickly. She beckons it forward again, sorry that she did not bring something to feed it.

From issue #6: spring/summer 2018

About the Author
Patrick Fitzgerald’s writing has previously appeared in The Dublin Review. He is currently at work on a novel about the early life of James Tackaberry Kearon, 1st Baron Kearon of Kilcavan, OM, FRS (13 August 1870 – 26 Dec 1963).