I have no first-hand experience of the state, but I firmly believe that it does change each person's view of who they are and what relation they are in to each other. I base this on the curious fact that not one, not two, but three different women, at different times, have told me that they knew on their wedding day, without doubt, that they shouldn't have married their husbands. These were women who'd been more or less living with their men perfectly happily. That's what makes me think that the vows themselves are potent, though whether for good or ill I don't know.

Our constitution also thinks that marriage is in itself a transforming act. The natural parents in the Baby Ann case got their child back because they married. The Irish Constitution pledges itself "to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack". So the poor adoptive parents hadn't a chance. Ann's natural parents married and therefore, with their child, they form a family exactly within the meaning of the constitution.

But it's not that the constitution believes that married people make a more stable family unit than unmarried people who choose to live together. It's not, in the case of adoption, that anyone argues that it is easier for a child to fit in with the norm than with the exception to the norm, though I think that's very likely true. The adoptive parents in this sad case are married too, don't forget. Defining the family as the natural children of parents who are in the contractual relationship called marriage must be about conception and about ownership as well. It is the definition that places as many restrictions as possible on the variousness of humanity. It makes it more likely than any other arrangement that a man can look around his table at the children gathered there and say complacently, 'these are mine'.

I remember hearing that, when Eamon de Valera was working on the constitution, he used to go around to Blackrock College on his bicycle and talk it over with his pal, the priest who was president there. I don't know whether their conversations were minuted, but if they were, I'd like to know whether they understood the implications of shoring up the privileged position of marriage. The natural parents of Ann marrying meant, Mrs Justice McGuinness said this week, that the question was no longer the best interests of the child but the lawfulness or otherwise of the adoptive parents' custody of her. "This meant, " she said, "that it was no longer possible for the court to look at the matter from the point of view of the child."

Many people believe that tremendously difficult questions such as the Ann question shouldn't be asked in the courts at all. They shouldn't be fitted to the template of legal argument in front of a judge or judges. There might be some sort of tribunal which reached some kind of legally binding outcome, but by a reflective rather than an argumentative process. I see no reason to believe that psychologists, social workers or teachers are necessarily better than lawyers at judging the outcome of adoption decisions. But they live and work with children, so they build up expertise in this area, which lawyers do not. And they're less arrogant and self-seeking, and they don't try to separate themselves from ordinary experience by tons of money and fake British accents.

Above all, a tribunal might be able to work quickly. One of the outrageous aspects of this case is that Ann's natural mother first tried to get her child back 10 months ago. You don't have to believe everything psychiatrists and other commentators say about a child's formative years to see that the delay in deciding who may act as parents to Ann is the most harmful thing that has happened to the child so far. Not to mention that the natural parents had a particular right to expedition, in a case where delay may have enormous adverse consequences for them as a family unit.

We'll never know what will become of the five people concerned. I hope not, anyway. I hope Ann will now disappear into the anonymous, win-some, lose-some, generally warm experience of growing up that most people know. I hope the adoptive parents, whose loss must be in some ways worse even than death, will find a child they can keep to give new love to. I hope the cowardly politicians, our so-called legislators, who have never had the vision or heart to reform the adoption laws, will prepare themselves to do so soon.

I hope we'll find some way to institutionalise the fact that in the latter part of the 20th century, there was another blossoming of the meaning of the injunction laid down by Christ and other great teachers that we should love one