Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 18 January 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

General Scheme of the Health (Termination of Pregnancy Services (Safe Access Zones)) Bill 2022: Department of Health (Resumed)

Mr. Muiris O'Connor:

I talked about the possibility of the safe access legislation being one element now of a wider, proactive roll-out of termination of pregnancy services. I would think we will engage with the HSE but with a view to formalising the intelligence-gathering around this. With the policy to provide protection and to protect the safety of all service users on all potential sites, it will be necessary, in implementation, to understand where the problems are arising and to direct the Garda resources to where the problems are arising. Even the maps which we may have to make available for all sites might then get down to street level and clarity might be provided to manage in a graduated way a site such as any of those where there is a persistent problem. There is just a bit of nuance there. We do want to think more broadly than this legislation, which is very important, but the proportion of GPs, for instance, providing this service is so low that there are other issues and we want to understand them and support GPs in doing this and-----

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