THE odds have tightened on the outcome of Friday's referendum, thanks to nerves plus possibly game-playing directed at the undecideds who may be the crucial element.
There is suspicion, as with Brexit, that some who feel the media and the public mood have been 'agin' them are pretending they haven't decided how to vote yet, but intend to vote No, as with the Brexit result, when the Yes vote to Leave turned out to be bigger than the polls suggested.
Whatever the result, it will have an effect here. Though, remarkably, perhaps the largest section of unionism and a stubborn, resolutely unthinking element in the media here refuse to see how the bigger state's politics feed into this society.
Some log events across the border - in 'The South' that is only yards away from many - if at all, out of the corner of an eye, like sounds outside the window, off the page of their own lives.
But Repealing the Eighth will not be pushed out of mind. Argument about it affects politics here already, as the outcome may well affect the lives and choices of women and girls inside the next few years.
The SDLP's 'special conference' on Saturday was the most measurable sign yet of how debate in the rest of the island has shifted views here, and will shift them further.
Leader Colum Eastwood told the Irish News last week the Saturday meeting, behind closed doors, would be part of a "very big conversation going on across Ireland".
True enough as an ideal version of current events, this exaggerated by a long way where the SDLP stands now in all-Irish terms.
What it signified most was the continuing and losing struggle to keep up with Sinn Féin - who have conducted their own characteristically slippery and convoluted conversation with themselves on abortion.
Maddeningly for the lesser party, future voters may ignore that slipperiness. The result of it already, in conjunction with a certain amount of talent and luck, is that still-new SF president Mary Lou McDonald is widely seen in the Republic as leading the entire Yes campaign, although her party will only decide their precise position on abortion after the referendum.
Meeting in Maghera to argue with each other had to be done, but the SDLP is not a 32 county party like that of Mary Lou.
At best, Saturday's outcome meant that some eager activists, freed now to exercise their consciences in public, could take themselves across the border for the campaign's last week; most, at a guess, for the Yes side.
The most senior SDLP female veteran, former deputy leader Brid Rodgers, unable to attend on Saturday contributed eloquently in advance, recalling her own opposition to the Eighth Amendment as a senator in 1983 for the "problems it would create for women" and appealing to the party to allow its members to vote according to their conscience, on a matter neither black nor white.
Ex-leaders spoke afterwards, at odds with each other. Eastwood and deputy Nichola Mallon announced the result, careful to twin it with the reminder that they are a pro-life party - but then Rodgers did that too.
Behind closed doors, as no doubt during that Saturday conference, party loyalists scoff at the idea that they are lagging behind Sinn Féin on this most troublesome issue.
They will say their willingness to allow a free vote means they respect their members, while republicans are whipped.
They may have closed the doors to debate freedom of conscience, but they came out in favour of it. Which still left the impression of an organisation inching anxiously forward, trying to figure where their potential future voters are and how far they can stretch their present support without scaring off old faithfuls.
Compared to the heat and fury of the 'conversation' across the border, where they have got themselves to seems a snarled-up contradiction.
But then the only straightforward parts of this conversation are those of women saying 'our bodies, our decision', and No campaigners saying 'abortion is murder and that's the end of it'.
Leo Varadkar has not been a strong voice for Yes. Unless he reinvents himself in these last few days, and if there is a narrow win for No, the bouncy young Taoiseach will take a considerable quantity of blame.
Either way, the frustration of watching from this distance while a decision is made will continue.
The drama and courage of a Yes will highlight yet again the pointlessness of the northern state.