Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our witnesses and thank them for their dedication and report.

I want to clear up a couple of things. There was a suggestion in some of the responses we got that politicians were not possessed of knowledge of the real issues to deal with this subject, which I believe in the first instance is an issue of women's health. I reject any suggestion that as elected representatives we might be inadequate in our intellectual capacity to deal with a subject of this nature. We deal with it all of the time. We have to, it is part of our work. We do it as best we can. It might not necessarily be to the high standards people would expect, but it is what we do. I am worried about a certain aspect of the report. It would appear that the report was conscious of the need to extend and expand the legislation to accommodate a need other than the needs that were presented to the committee prior to the referendum. I want to settle that and point it out. Women's health was the primary issue. We all dealt with the issues. I dealt with more than an average number of them that had tragic consequences, not as a result of my intervention but as a result of the intervention or lack of intervention on behalf of some professionals. The fact of the matter remains, insofar as I am concerned it is still a matter of women's health, and the issue of the three-day wait, which seems to have been presented as an obstacle to women's health. We extensively interviewed people who pointed out that the non-existence of a waiting period was a factor in what happened afterwards. They presented their case in a factual and evidential way and to the best of their ability in the way it affected them before the advent of legislation.

I want to point out that it is a women's health issues insofar as medical abortion, which was available at the time, had certain connotations.

It was unsupervised, it was readily available and there was no approval or suggestion of oversight of any pre-existing medical conditions or, for that matter, mental conditions. It was necessary to create a space, such as the three-day wait, which was the best that was available at the time, in order to enable the woman or girl, as the case may be, in making her decision, which she is entitled to do. We should not make the decision for anybody – man, woman or child. That is something that is readily available and constitutionally available to the woman, man or child, whatever the case may be.

I want to emphasise that with regard to this particular review, the purpose of which was look at how it was working, not the extent to which it was working, which is important. I get a steady stream of communications from people who say that this is not what we voted for, and they have a right to raise that question. They might be wrong, like politicians are sometimes regarded as being wrong, but they may also be right. They claim this was on the agenda all of the time and that it was a question of just getting one part of it passed by referendum and then to wait for the next part. That was not our job at the time. I believe we did our job as well as could be done anywhere in any other country in Europe, and I think it was effective.

We are now in a situation where we need to ask the question as to whether women who had a concern – they were either pregnant or thought they were pregnant - would go to their GP to ascertain the extent to which and how they should proceed. It was not a question of whether they should go to another jurisdiction for an abortion; it was the extent to which their needs could and should be met here. That still remains and, to my mind, it has not been answered yet. In the case of those who went to other jurisdictions for a termination of pregnancy, we do not know enough about the reasons they went there. For example, were they from that jurisdiction originally or were they going for privacy reasons to another jurisdiction? That is what we discovered to be the case in some of the situations we dealt with. The issue still continues. Those of us who were there then, prior to the referendum, need to be satisfied that what we are talking about is one and the same thing. Is it the woman's right to have the maximum amount of information and her right to decide which way she wishes to go? She listens to the information put to her. If the information laid in front of her is not adequate, then it is necessary to provide that and by one means or another to establish her right to have that information.

I have suggested in the past, with no respect to Ms O'Shea, that the report is a considerable step forward from what we passed in the referendum and the legislation that was published before the people. One thing that politicians are always aware of is being caught out. Very often, we see things happening in the country that should not happen, and because we did not speak up or raise a particular issue at the time, we are seen to be lax in the way we go about our duty. These are important issues. I do not think this is about an extension of the legislation because that would be challenged. I know it has been suggested that it cannot be challenged in a court but, of course, everything can be challenged in a court, and it is wrong to suggest it cannot be. That is what lawyers do for a living, and they have a right to do that as well.

I want to be reassured that there is no intention in respect of the three-day waiting period other than to provide the woman with the maximum possible amount of information relative to her situation and condition, her concerns and her worries. The availability of that advice is something that we can and should question, and our witnesses should question as well, with regard to why it is not happening to some extent and who has decided that it should not happen. The committee questioned this strongly at the time and we were reluctantly given an undertaking that this information would be made available without interference. We still need that and I would like to see some reference to it.

There was a reference to politicians’ intelligence, Chairman, but I would not-----