Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Unless the Minister engages I will leave the O'Shea report for another day and will not speak about last night's documentary. I have already made my position on the documentary and on RTÉ's behaviour with it known at an earlier stage today in the House. Suffice it to say that I think the many flaws in Ms O'Shea's knowledge were clearly exposed at the committee, not least in her apparently being unaware of the fact that some countries have a mandatory waiting period.

My friend and colleague Senator-Clifford Lee really misunderstands me when she suggests that there is anything about judging other people involved in the decision to pray silently in a public place as part of being a witness around abortion. We are all familiar with the phrase "Judge not, lest ye be judged". Ultimately, it is never appropriate for any of us to judge other people. We might make political judgments about each other from time to time. As public persons, we are a little bit more susceptible to that or we cannot complain quite as much as the private person can when other people presume to make certain kinds of judgment about our motivations as to what we do in politics. As far as possible, we should always avoid judging each other's motivations. There is a hell of a difference between not judging people and not judging their acts. We find ourselves having to judge other people's acts all the time. No doubt Senator Clifford-Lee and all of us here have, at one point or another, got up and condemned people's acts in this House, be they acts of terrorism abroad or acts of negligence or failure on the part of officials at home. We cannot have a thinking society unless we are willing to exercise some kind of a judgment on each other's acts from time to time. To that extent, I can make no apologies for using the words "complicit" or "harmful" when I speak about abortionists or those who carry out abortions. I do not know to what extent they bear subjective responsibility for what they are doing. That will be judged in another forum. However, what I can say is that if right was right, people who do what they do should be in jail, because they kill another human being. That is never justified. The intentional killing of another human being is never justified. It is a time-honoured principle in medicine that practitioners do not engage in the deliberate killing of patients.That has been abandoned in the area of abortion across the western world and in other parts of the world because people have managed to convince themselves that the unborn child is not a human being. Everybody with any basic knowledge of science, however, knows that the child is a human being because he or she has an individual and unique set of chromosomes from the beginning of his or her life. A decision is taken by some to treat what are manifestly human beings at the appropriate stage of their development as less than human. This has happened at different times in different places with regard to different categories of human beings throughout history with sorry and horrific results. Let us be clear, however, that the medical professional who sticks a needle into the heart of a child as part of the process called foeticide, regardless of whether or not that child has severe or fatal disabilities, is doing something that should horrify every decent human being. There is no justification for directly attacking another human being except in self defence. We spend hours in this Chamber discussing whether countries are acting lawfully in their self defence when they exercise the use of force in the Middle East or elsewhere. The exception that permits violence in self defence is always one that must be approached with great caution and care and should always trouble us, but the idea that an innocent child who has never seen the light of day can be fairly attacked and his or her life ended deliberately is not authentic human rights. It is a perversion of human rights. That is my position.

I have always said that the person who seeks an abortion deserves great sympathy and support because particular pressures arise in pregnancy, as we all know. Of the pro-life people I know, I do not think it has ever been anybody's position that the law should ever target the parents, particularly the mother, of the unborn child unless there is a case of coercion by a father or something like that. The people who should know better are those charged with caring and have a time-honoured Hippocratic oath they are supposed to follow and a principle in medicine that you do no harm but do as much good as you can. That is what is being judged. It is the actions of those people who, if right were right, would face prosecution for attacking innocent human life in the womb. They are complicit in something that is very harmful.

Somebody who wants to witness against the injustice of this is in the same situation as somebody who wants to go out in the street and witness to the injustice of what is happening in Gaza, Ukraine or wherever conscience leads him or her to protest and about whatever conscience leads him or her to protest. That act of conscience is vital to our society and the maximum freedom for that act of conscience is vital to our society. What is being sought here is not the right to shout as much as you want. It is the right to engage in silent prayer. We live in a country with a tradition where we should be more sensitive than most to the persecution of people for their religious beliefs. It is part of our own history and part of what is happening today. Irish missionaries and others have been shut up in prisons in states with totalitarian regimes for daring to stand by the faith they have. They have languished in prison and sometimes died for their faith. I am thinking of things that happened to Irish missionaries in Korea and other places in the 20th century. The idea that we would go anywhere near prohibiting people from engaging in respectful silent prayer in any place in our country and that we would fail to see that there is a pre-eminent right to be wherever you want to be in silence if it is a public place and you are not trespassing on somebody else's property should be a red line for a Government that thinks of itself as democratic and seeks to represent and enable all citizens in the exercise of their freedom of expression.

The Cathaoirleach mentioned that we last spoke on the Bill on 7 March. Since then, there was a resounding referendum result that, if anything, expressed how arrogant and out-of-touch the people feel the Government is on a range of issues. The Government has stood accused - fairly, in the eyes of public opinion - of not listening, acting behind the scenes, only listening to certain groups, privileging certain voices above others and ramming legislation through very quickly. At least this is getting fair time now, which has not always been the case. The Government has been seen as arrogant and out-of-touch to the point where it is willing to cancel or silence other voices in pursuit of what it sees as goals it can cobble a majority together around. It is that failure to attend to other voices - sometimes hidden voices and sometimes silenced voices - that makes many people in our country mistrustful of the Government and of government right now in a way that in some ways is very bad for our democracy. The Government is at the same thing again now, shutting down the freedoms we always thought people had, freedoms that have not been abused. I have heard allegations and, as I pointed out previously, the law is there to deal with them and let it deal with them. The Garda Commissioner said the law was there and, as I pointed out previously, there have been no complaints from hospitals. We do not have a problem with people praying silently intimidating other people. It is impossible to conceive of how somebody in a silent place could in any way be intimidatory of another person but I will tell you what is important - place is important. If you go to any country or city churchyard or any graveyard in this country, you will know how important place is to people - the place where your loved one lies, the place where your loved one died, the place where you first met your loved one and so on, the place in country churchyards where the little babies who were not baptised in darker times lie and the cillíní that honour and remember them. The importance of place is something that we really need to attend. It is no argument to say, "Ah sure you can pray against abortion in the privacy of your own room." That misses the point completely. The people who are disturbed by the deep injustice of abortion as they see it, regardless of whether or not one agrees with them, feel the need to be in some kind of proximity to where the harm is being done as they see it and to pray for a better resolution of that situation and a return to justice and compassion. The significance of place is important for them. They are not there to show off to themselves, to others or to each other. It is the consciousness of place. Obviously, they cannot be in the hospital where the injustice is being done. Needless to say, this amendment does not seek to give them that right. The idea that any person in this country, given our history and what we understand about place, would be restricted from standing in any public place and praying silently is a horror and would only happen on this subject.

The reason it is only happening on this subject is because, if I may use religious language, the promotion of abortion has turned into some kind of sacrament for an activist group in our society that is obsessed with changing the way our society thinks about abortion and turning it from something that previously people shuddered at as an injustice to something that is now seen as a social good and to be celebrated. The people who cheered and danced in Dublin Castle on the day of repeal, to the horror of thousands, are the people who want this kind of legislation, not because it solves any problem or deals with any injustice that is taking place but because it is part of their fetishisation of abortion and the turning of it into something to be put on an altar of some kind and shielded from any kind of opposition, to the point where we have this novel curtailment of people's freedoms.It is a curtailment that does not, to my knowledge, have any comparator. I am not aware of any other service that is so tied-in, in the desire of some, with the need to crush all dissent and to crush the visibility of any dissent. I said that I would not talk about the RTÉ documentary but I will say this much: that documentary last night was all about crushing the visibility of any alternative point of view. That is what is going on here and that is what this legislation is about. It is about a campaign of forgetting - to try to forget that there was ever anybody who ever thought that abortion was unjust. However, that campaign will not succeed because the science is against it. The science clearly shows the wonder of human life from its very beginnings in a way that we could never tell before. Medicine, and all that can be done to alleviate human pain and suffering, is better than it ever was before. It has never been more possible, if there was only the will to do it, to address and seek to protect fully the lives of mothers and their unborn children and to minimise situations where there is ever any kind of conflict between the necessary medical care of a mother and the welfare of her unborn child.

Sadly, sometimes there will be conflicts and it is not always possible to save the unborn child. That was the position of our law before repeal and nobody had any objection to that but what we have now is the celebration of abortion. We have the inability by our Government and by our policymakers to even say that we should try to lessen the amount of it going on. Senator Clifford Lee, my friend in other contexts but not a friend to this issue, was saying that sometimes it is the best thing. How can it be the best thing when an innocent person is dispensed with forever? There is no second chance. There is no coming back from death. There is coming back from everything else but not from death. As Peig Sayers had it, "Bíonn súil le muir, ní bhíonn súil le huaigh".

I would ask people even now just to think again about what they are celebrating, embracing, supporting, campaigning for and promoting. However, if one cannot be convinced now on that issue, I hope the day comes when one will be but at least accept there is another point of view which many people hold and that there is a responsibility to those people to respect their freedom of expression and that what is being sought here is a very modest defence of their freedom of expression.