Ms Ailbhe Smyth:

On the question of whether Choice Ireland was happy that Ireland would retain a restrictive abortion regime, it is not, and neither is the National Women's Council, nor Action on X, but neither, perhaps more tellingly, are 82% of those questioned in the recent Red C poll. Some 82% of voters supported a constitutional amendment to extend the right to abortion to all cases where the health of the mother is seriously threatened and also to cases of rape. I will come back to the point made a little while ago by my colleague, Ms Kennedy, which is that we have never really had an opportunity since 1983 to answer a direct question about having more progressive abortion legislation in this country through a referendum. Increasingly I am of the view that I do not like referendums any more than anybody else here does, but they are very useful in democracies. In fact, they are important in democracies. Furthermore, they help legislatures to know what people are thinking in democracies. I would have thought that, given the amount of conflict, trouble, divisiveness, controversy, bad feeling and all kinds of things that we have had on the issue of abortion over 30 years - I remember extremely well every one of those issues, as do others in the Chamber today - it is about time a sensible practical question was put to the people of this country and that we got a clear answer, at least for the next decade.

On Senator Bacik's question on fatal foetal abnormalities, obviously I am thinking of the case of D v. Ireland, which went to the European Court of Human Rights. While that case was deemed to be inadmissible in that court because not all of the remedies had been exhausted in the courts in Ireland, at the same time it was apparently agreed that the Government had an argument in its defence that it would have been possible to interpret Article 40.3.3° as permitting terminations in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, and the ECHR agreed with that point. Therefore, there is something there which is very important to the lives of perhaps not very many women, but it is absolutely crucial to those lives, and it does require exploring. Perhaps that might be one of the points raised by the committee in its report to the Legislature.