Who could possibly have foreseen this?

The Irish Independent reports:

THE eminent UK obstetrician chairing the inquiry into the death of Savita Halappanavar co-authored a report which called on countries with restrictive abortion laws to look at more liberal regimes.

Professor Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, head of obstetrics at St George's Hospital London, co-authored a report in 2009 which he said would "encourage societies and countries with restrictive abortion laws to look at the evidence in four of liberal abortion laws".

Well, I’m glad we can look forward to a completely fair, impartial investigation then.

On the opinion pages, the Independent states, apparently without a hint of irony: "Head of inquiry is perfect choice to uncover truth of this tragedy.” Eilish O’Regan’s article is one long sigh of liberal relief.

In other news, David McWilliams comes remarkably close to stating that Ireland might leave the EU if Britain does. He doesn’t quite say that, of course, our membership of the EU being one of those unquestionable givens of Irish political and media life. But I think it’s fair to say that he implies it. Here he indicates what an EU sans le Royaume-Uni would have in store for this country:

For Ireland, it would mean being part of an enterprise where of the two other countries we joined with in 1973, one isn't in the euro (Denmark) and one isn't in the EU (Britain). Far more importantly, it would mean our two major trading partners, the US and the UK, would not be in the same orbit politically and we would be tied to a project which we would be entirely unsuited to economically. Ireland would be a total outlier in terms of economic integration, while culturally we would be in a club with which we share practically nothing.

Disheartening though the support of IBEC and “business community” types for the EU is, at least we have the comfort of knowing that they only support the project out of unscruplous greed. The moment there is a clear, unanswerable economic argument against EU membership, they will jump ship. In that sense, they are different from the real euro-fanatics, the politicians, bureaucrats and Monet professors who have nailed their colours so firmly to the euro-mast that they will let it drag them down to the icy deep, where no one will miss them.