Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am alarmed by Professor Higgins' tone in suggesting we are being over the top, emotive and trying to make out that the church will come in and steal the entire agenda. He has got it wrong. I was a young woman in the early 1980s. I had an abortion at that time and had to go to Liverpool for it. I campaigned against the eighth amendment as a young woman and then lived through the years that saw the darkest of things done to women, from what happened in the Kerry babies case to Savita Halappanavar. That runs deep because of what is at the base of it. I do not know if Professor Higgins has read Emily O'Reilly's wonderful book Masterminds of the Rightin which she traces succinctly the shadowy forces that brought in that referendum and, later, the Maastricht protocol, which stopped abortion coming into our country. They did not wear habits and were not traipsing around corridors with veils on them; they were top officials linked to organisations like Opus Dei and the Knights of St. Columbanus. They were deeply embedded in the health service and the Civil Service and they saw to it that Ireland maintained an extraordinary conservative agenda in relation to women's reproductive rights. We have broken from that but people like me, though probably not so much the younger generation who did not live through it, have a bitter taste in our mouths. We want to see a national maternity hospital fully owned and run by the State.

I dispute what has been said about it being owned according to the lease. It is not my dispute. It can be seen in the St. Vincent's fact sheet. I have read the details into the record of the Dáil. It disputes what has been said. It asks who owns the land the new national maternity hospital will be built on and it states: "The land is owned by St. Vincent’s Healthcare Group." Who will run the hospital? The hospital will be run as part of St. Vincent's Healthcare Group. We have spent the week teasing out these questions. We have got some clarity on some things but not on many more.

I am delighted to hear Professor Higgins say he would welcome the introduction of a definition into those documents in respect of the worrying clause relating to "clinically appropriate". We worry about that. Who says whether it is appropriate that somebody has sterilisation or an abortion? Who says it is appropriate how they have their baby? If it is not the woman and she does not have a say, then who is telling her what to do with her body? I hope Professor Higgins accepts that as bona fide. I think the world of St. Vincent's and of these doctors. I met Dr. Walsh the other night in the RTÉ studio. I have nothing against the witnesses. This is not personal, but they have to understand where it stems from. It is totally legitimate.