Growing up as an Irish Catholic in the 1990s and early 2000s, I was quietly but fiercely proud of my country. Our economy was the envy of the world. The Good Friday Agreement had brought peace in the North. The Church had lost a lot of its temporal power, but the abuse scandals made it seem that it might be better and holier that way. Most importantly, we’d made a success of ourselves without making the terrible mistake that other Western countries had. We’d banned the death penalty but hadn’t legalised abortion: our state didn’t authorise premeditated killing of noncombatants in any circumstances. What’s more, our maternal mortality rates and gender equality measures suggested that you didn’t need legal abortion to be a perfectly decent middle-of-the road Western liberal democracy. There was a real sort of Irish exceptionalism.