Mr. Niall Behan:

The best statistics that we go on are the ones we get from the Department of Health in the UK. They relate to women who give Irish addresses to abortion clinics, mainly in England. We see a trend. After 1983, after the amendment is passed, we see those figures going up and up. We see the eighth amendment making no impact on the number of women travelling to the UK. When we get to 2001 and 2002, however, we see a change, a reduction. It is an interesting point. Why have we got this reduction? Why have we got this doubling of the figures in the 18 years after 1983 and then a reduction in the last 16 years that is almost consistent across all the years? The thing we can point to is the policy changes, the political consensus that we had here between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Labour Party, the Independents and the left wing parties in the 1980s around this attempt to improve sexuality education.

Access to contraception and the establishment of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency has had a huge impact. We can go much further in that regard and get much better access to contraceptive services and improve sexuality education. The law does not impact on those rights but makes it more difficult and is more harmful to children.