Irish Abortion Referendum

Following the landslide vote to overturn strict abortion laws in the Irish Republic, attention has shifted to Northern Ireland - the last corner of the British Isles to resist both legal abortion and gay marriage. The Prime Minister Theresa May is facing growing calls to bring the laws in line with the rest of the UK. It's a complicated political picture, but it raises a number of important moral questions. The first is about the extent to which a nation's religious and cultural traditions should be enshrined in its laws. Is it morally acceptable that Northern Ireland should have laws on abortion and same-sex marriage that are different from those in the rest of the UK? Can - or should - a government ever be neutral, or merely procedural, on substantive moral issues? Yet, the Irish referendum also highlighted a wider moral point about the concept of shame, and its complex relationship with respectability and institutional religion. Speaking about the scandal of Ireland's mother and baby homes, the former Taoiseach, Enda Kenny said: "No nuns broke into our homes to take our children. We gave them up because of our morbid and perverse pursuit for respectability." After the abortion vote, the current Prime Minister Leo Varadkar declared: "The burden of shame is gone". At what point does shame stop being corrective and start to become corrosive? Does it still have a useful role to play in society? From #MeToo to the public pillorying of greedy bankers and carbon-emitters, don't we still need the sanction of shame? Witnesses are Susie Boniface, Ed Condon, Martin Pollecoff and Prof Julian Savulescu.

Producer: Dan Tierney.