Mr. Niall Behan:

I will respond first to Deputy McGrath's question on the IFPA. We are a medical organisation and see 20,000 clients per annum. We have reached our conclusion on abortion and criminalisation of abortion based on our dealings with the many women who have come to our services. As a result of that dialogue, we believe it is best that these decisions are left to the woman and her doctor and that criminal law should not come into it and does not serve any purpose in this discussion.

The fear is that if criminal law is removed the abortion rates will increase. We know that this is not true. There is enough evidence available which suggests that the criminal law does not impact on abortion rates. That is the reason we included some information in our submission on what happens in other countries. We also included that information because in the A, B and C judgment the court suggested to the Irish Government that in seeking to resolve these very difficult issues, it should look to what happens in other European countries. As such, we need to look beyond the UK, which is to where we usually look for an answer. That is the reason we included that information in the submission.

Other questions - I apologise if I have not taken on board everybody's questions - were on issues such as suicidal thoughts and how many clients we saw. I referred in my opening statement to two female clients who had followed through on their threats and committed suicide. Many more of the women we saw may not have been suicidal but owing to mental health reasons such as depression and so on were in crisis pregnancy. The vast majority of those women have travelled to the UK.

On the criminalisation of abortion, how we might respond to that and our view in regard to the unborn, we must look to what has happened around abortion rates in Ireland during the past ten years, which rate has decreased fairly substantially. The last time there was a similar hearing to this on the abortion issue, parliamentarians heard from a range of people. The medical advice given to parliamentarians at that time was that to reduce abortion rates we needed better sex education and greater access to contraception. From that the Crisis Pregnancy Agency was established. That has been successful in terms of reducing abortion rates during the past ten years.