Justin Barrett

Age: 30

Appearance: Innocent

Newsworthiness: Leading campaign to derail the government's proposed abortion referendum

Had Justin Barrett been born a century ago, he might well have found himself hauled from his Kilmainham jail cell on a bright May morning in 1916, put up against a wall and swiftly dispatched to his maker.

As it is, the young and increasingly prominent anti-Nice and anti-abortion campaigner gets his self-proclaimed republican and Catholic kicks through a type of political activism that has already helped defeat one referendum and may yet derail or defeat another -- and possibly a third.

If next year's abortion referendum aborts itself or is defeated at the polls, Barrett will return to the scene of his greatest triumph -- the Nice Treaty -- and carry on the preparations already begun for the defeat of the second Nice referendum. Finding a new slogan won't be difficult, said Barrett; the word 'still' may simply be inserted into the old one to read 'You will still lose money, power and freedom'.

Barrett's official position is press officer to Youth Defence, the anti-abortion group that is crusading as the Mother and Child Campaign for the abortion referendum. Since Nice his position has developed with his profile. The activist is now widely seen as the key mover in the attempts to upset the abortion referendum, and as someone who will play a prominent role in the next No to Nice campaign.

As agents of destruction go, Barrett is an unlikely nemesis. Slightly built, quietly spoken, self-effacing, he looks and behaves more like the local church sacristan than the highly effective operator he is. To date, Barrett's value to the groups he has represented has been to instruct them in new methods of campaigning which attract a base of support outside the existing narrow core support.

He learned his big political lesson from the 1996 divorce referendum. Barrett was part of the No Divorce Campaign alliance, the methods of which were widely seen as having contributed to the win for the other side -- albeit an extremely narrow win.

Barrett now admits that the eye-catching `Hello divorce, bye bye Daddy' poster was "a big mistake" because, he said, it addressed only the campaign's own support base. "The poster backfired," he said, "because, while we saw it as illustrating something that does tend to happen after divorce -- fathers being gradually removed from their children -- others saw the message as offensive, suggesting that fathers as a group were simply waiting for divorce so that they could leave their kids."

The lesson was adapted for the No to Nice campaign. Many of Barrett's people were solely concerned with the human rights convention and the possibility that abortion might be introduced to Ireland on foot of it. Barrett pointed out that the convention properly belonged, not to Nice, but to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. In any event, he said, a No vote would be secured only if the issue base was widened.

In the end, No to Nice produced a smorgasbord of issues, from neutrality to defence, sovereignty and the perils of further integration. Liberals rubbed shoulders with diehard conservatives on shared platforms, and the resultant energy and conviction led to the referendum defeat.

Abortion, by its nature, does not lend itself to a multiple-issue approach. But even here Barrett has been attempting to widen the base on which the proposals can be opposed.

A new poster campaign launched last week focused not on the evils of abortion, but rather on embryo research and the potential -- as he and his group sees it -- for the new legislation to pave the way for such research to be done in Irish laboratories and factories.

Launching the campaign last week, Barrett said it was designed to focus on a "serious -- and we believe deliberate -- omission of the unborn child before implantation from legal protection. This omission is undoubtedly designed to pave the way for experimentation on the child embryo in Ireland".

He warned that "if the government remains obstinate and refuses to present a proper pro-life amendment to the people next year, the Mother and Child Campaign believes that it will have created a definite and immovable majority against the amendment, which will fail".

At the tender age of 30 Barrett has more than a decade of campaigning behind him on the two issues of EU integration and abortion. He was born in Cork in 1971, from where he was fostered and later adopted at the age of two before moving to live with his new family in north Tipperary. Barrett says that those formative experiences left him with a profound sense of the importance of the family and family life.

He attended Borrisokane vocational school and later Athlone RTC, where he did business studies. Midway through his chartered accountancy studies came the 1992 X case and that year's three-part abortion referendum.

Barrett left his books to join Youth Defence and campaign for the defeat of the proposals. He wasn't a neophyte. By 1992 he had already belonged to a string of political organisations including Young Fine Gael, People First and the Constitutional Rights Campaign, and had briefly flirted with the Pro-Life Campaign. In 1987 he had campaigned against the Single European Act.

"I'm an Irish nationalist," he said. "I believe that the nation is the best way to run governments. There is a need to have a set of shared values and common destiny. The EU isn't about community, it's about a struggle for power. Good government is small government; I believe in the right of the Irish people to set their own agenda."

Barrett's views on religion and patriotism were expounded at more length in a book he published earlier this year called Ireland, United, Gaelic and Free. According to one approving review of the rather self-explanatory tome, Barrett applauded the nationalist theories of Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, characterised the United States as an empire in decline (pre-September 11) and nominated China as the primary threat for the 21st century (pre-Osama bin Laden).

Barrett says that his own political role models are Padraig Pearse and Michael Collins.

He admires Pearse's "semi-spiritual" texts on nationalism and Collins' political pragmatism.

"Between the two of them," he said, "you have a unified, guiding philosophy."

Since 1992 Barrett has immersed himself in Youth Defence, but he only became a full-time, paid employee in 1999. He says he supported himself with various jobs, including working as a counter assistant in Supermacs. He's now married to another anti-abortion activist, Bernadette Carroll.

The couple live in Longford and have two small children.

His choice of Youth Defence over the more established and then more powerful Pro-Life Campaign was "obvious, with hindsight", he said.

"Youth Defence sent out a 100 per cent message. They were more determined, more enthusiastic. The others didn't seem as clear-minded. Also, their exclusive focus on political lobbying seemed naive.

"They made a fundamental error in not continuing to educate people about abortion after the first amendment was passed [in 1983]. They ignored the potential for a continuing decline in support for the amendment. In the long run, no amendment can last unless the support base has lasted."

A small group of some six people forms the core of Youth Defence. The others are accountant Niamh Nic Mhathúna, Eircom employee Una Nic Mhathúna, GP Dr Sean ó Domhnaill, lift engineer Peter Murphy and addiction counsellor Maurice Colgan. All are in their late twenties or early thirties.

Until this referendum Youth Defence had never appeared to pose a significant threat to the dominance of the Pro-Life Campaign (PLC). What has emerged now is a sizeable fissure in anti-abortion activism, with the 'purist' position of Youth Defence contrasted -- largely by Youth Defence -- with the 'watered-down pragmatism' of the PLC.

Youth Defence claims that the PLC-supported government proposals fail to give legal protection to life from conception.

The PLC denies this, while privately admitting that, while the proposals are not as strong as they might like, they are the best that any anti-abortion grouping is going to get for the foreseeable future.

Barrett said: "We've tried to maintain cordial relations with the PLC, but there are fundamental differences of position. We're not persuading them and they're not persuading us. But I've spoken with [the PLC's] William Binchy over the last while, and let me tell you this: he's not going to be very convincing on Prime Time."

In its turn, the PLC professes a healthy respect for Barrett, but characterises his approach to the referendum as reckless.

One PLC source said: "He's very genuine in his views, but he's lost faith in the political system, that it can work. He's very cynical towards politicians in general. His opposition to the referendum is not based on any legal advice, but on fears of politicians' real intentions.

"He's highly motivated, a great organiser, and he appeals to a constituency that has also lost faith in the political system, which makes it a very difficult constituency for us to reach out to. We don't think he's on an ego trip, but what he's doing is wrong and irresponsible. Ultimately, his analysis is a fatalistic one. As for the new billboard campaign, we think it's outlandish and offensive."

The billboard posters -- set to be unveiled last week -- carry pictures of Bertie Ahern and health minister Micheál Martin, urging them not to support embryo research.

Barrett will have to wait a while longer to find out whether his efforts to abort the referendum are successful.

He claims -- probably correctly -- that the Progressive Democrats are under extreme internal pressure to halt the march towards a spring poll. But, he said, "government Buildings [Ahern and his advisers] is digging its heels in big time.

"They want to teach us a lesson in power politics; they have an interest in making sure that those who defeated the Nice referendum are now defeated themselves."

Not even last week's strong statement of episcopal support for the referendum proposals has fazed Barrett.

Last month he said that neither he nor his supporters were "waiting with bated breath" for what the bishops had to say.

This weekend Barrett said that while the hierarchy's support now makes it more likely that the referendum will be held, "it won't change too much on the ground, and it may also damage whatever measure of liberal support there was for the referendum. It will still be defeated."