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

I thank Ms McMahon for her presentation. I totally agree with Deputy Hourigan on the analogy with Covid. I do not like it either and I do not think it serves us well here, not because of the Es, because what gardaí do well is educate, enforce and so on, but because the Covid legislation was rigid emergency legislation brought in to try to contain a pandemic and on an understandably temporary basis. I therefore do not like the comparison with it. I sat on the Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which tried to design the legislation on termination of pregnancy, and we discussed this issue a lot. What we are trying to achieve here is that women and pregnant people can access their legal right to advice, termination of pregnancy or any sort of healthcare in that regard without being bullied, harassed, intimidated, insulted, told they are murderers or being shown horrible images that have to do with their bodies or the potential of their bodies to reproduce. That is what we are trying to deal with here. Safe access zones are not enough. We need to change the whole societal approach to the issue of women's healthcare.

I have a couple of questions for the witnesses. The first just struck me when I was coming in here today. I am not a member of this committee, but is it unusual or unique for gardaí to come before a health committee to talk about legislation on health? I know they appear before the justice committee regularly, but what about dealing with the health committee?