Rónán Mullen (Independent)
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I note the contrast in the delegates' answers. I turn to their claim, without producing evidence in front of us, although admittedly they did not have time to do so, that there is no evidence that a restriction in the law causes a lower incidence of abortion. Is it not strange that Britain which has a population roughly 15 times the size of Ireland's - 60 million compared to 4 million - nonetheless has an abortion rate at least 30 times the rate for Ireland? In Britain there is something short of 200,000 abortions a year. Borrowing Deputy Ruth Coppinger's figures for the likely incidence of abortions induced by medical pills, Ireland might have a figure of 6,000 a year. I find it difficult to understand how in their presentation the delegates did not address that glaring statistic.

I draw the delegates' attention to something that came up last week on which I was challenged, but I was correct. It is that in Northern Ireland which has a smaller population than the Republic the Advertising Standards Authority upheld a billboard campaign that claimed that there was a reasonable probability that approximately 100,000 people were alive in Northern Ireland who would otherwise have been aborted had it been legal to do so. It stated, "On balance, we concluded that the evidence indicated that there was a reasonable probability" and "Because we considered that readers would understand the figure to represent an estimate, we concluded that the claim was unlikely to materially mislead readers". A similar conservative estimate has been made about the impact of Irish constitutional law. Would the delegates from the WHO accept that they are making a claim that seems bizarre in the light of the disparity in the abortion figures for Britain and Ireland?