Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I already spoke on Second Stage in some detail on my objection to this section. The diagnosis, especially the circumstances outlined by Deputy Naughten, poses huge difficulties.

There seems to be major evidence from psychiatrists that they do not believe that abortion is a treatment for suicide and there seems to be some evidence that any possible saving of life would be more than offset by the higher rate of suicide for people post-abortion. In other words, we would not be saving people's lives. As this legislation is drafted, we could potentially leave a large number of people with severe disabilities that were otherwise perfectly healthy. We know in recent times of the huge trauma of preventable situations that come before us now that should never have happened. It puts psychiatrists in an impossible situation to make a judgment where they know that the rate of clinical accuracy is very low. As the Minister himself has said time and again, there are no clinical markers here. There are no biochemical markers here. Except for trying to get into the mind of another person, there is nothing one can do at a physical level to assess this. Therefore, in my view it puts psychiatrists in an impossible situation.

We know that mental health grounds in other jurisdictions have been the wedge to lead to a situation where I believe the Irish have said they do not want to go, because they want to protect the equal right to life of the child. For that reason, I will be opposing this section.

There is nobody in this room who has not been touched by suicide involving somebody close to them. It is a huge problem in our society. If we are all honest, we do not do enough to deal with the difficulty of suicide in our society. Whatever comes out of this Bill and whatever we decide here, if we are serious about this challenge of suicide in our society, I hope we will come back and devote the same time and resources to see how we can reduce the horrendous rate of suicide in our society, which is affecting every family in the country. Suicide in a family will change that family forever. Whatever differences of opinion we might have on this Bill and where the balance of good lies, I would hope that when we are finished here, we will not think that the suicide issue in society was dealt with, because that is not the case. I hope that we come back and really commit ourselves to seeing what we can do to reduce the horrendous rate of suicide that we have in our society at the moment.