Ms Mary O'Toole:

My fellow speakers have outlined all of the various options in the context of repeal, replace and amend. The point I am making is that putting in a long amendment may actually not be helpful because once it is interpreted, it is inclined to be fixed in a way that is very difficult to unfix if it causes any disquiet. The benefit of legislation is that it can be amended much more easily than the Constitution, a change to which would require a referendum.

As to whether this should be an issue in respect of which the courts would have no input and no power to determine constitutional rights, as a lawyer I am somewhat uncomfortable with that, but that is just a personal view. The main aim is to ensure everybody is clear, given the complications of the pre-1983 position and given the possible complications of deletion of the amendment simpliciter that one would arrive at a situation where one would make it clear that we were starting on a new page, as it were, and that rights would be defined in a particular way in legislation and that one was giving the Legislature the entitlement to do this. Obviously, the Legislature would probably have to make it clear in advance of any referendum what legislation it had in mind. Even that would not be completely simple, but what one would be trying to do is avoid the pitfalls because of the pre-1983 provisions. Professor de Londras said in her paper that it might well be that if there was to be a deletion of the right to life of the unborn, one would arrive at a situation where although there was no right to life of the unborn, the right of the woman as a citizen to bodily integrity and so on would then come back to the fore again, but that would not necessarily preclude the possibility that the Legislature could limit that right in accordance with the common good, as has happened in other jurisdictions where there is no recognition. The problem is that nobody can say for certain what is going to happen; therefore, what one needs to do is try to arrive at a position where one could be as certain as one could be of the result one wanted to achieve; the extent to which one wished to change the current situation and how one wanted to change it and what the pre-1983 provisions might do to that intention.