Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I would like to thank Deputies Shortall, Tóibín, Creighton and Kirk for putting forward these meaningful amendments and seconding them. We must make an effort to see the meaningfulness of what are otherwise just remote sentences, statistics or hypotheses, because this issue will affect real lives. As Deputy Kirk said, the vista of late-term abortion and the death, destruction or maiming of a foetus is appalling.

It is equally repugnant, however, if such takes place in the early stages of pregnancy - at 12 weeks, for example, as in the X case. That is just as repugnant.

Deputy Shortall made an important point about revisiting the legal structure or architecture, as the Minister for Justice and Equality calls it. We do not want such an architecture if it is a repugnant architecture for a repugnant erosion of the values of life, the values of society and the values within families. We should remember that the child, whether it is at 12 weeks gestation or 20 weeks, is a child of a father and a mother, a potential brother or sister, a potential niece or nephew, and has a 51% chance of being a girl and, in due course, a woman, rather than a boy. We have to recognise the tangible connection of flesh and blood that we are dealing with here.

The issue Deputy Shortall is seeking to address is very important and these are extremely worthy amendments. The problem, however, is that they are part of the architecture of the overall hull of a ship which, as I have said, has a deep fault line. No matter how many lifeboats or life-jackets or light beacons we seek to apply, the hull of the ship remains cracked and flawed and always capable of falling asunder. We must be very careful of what we are about here. We might well be cement-setting across Irish society and all 166 of us in this Dáil will have our initials in that cement. If it is the wrong cement, our authorship will be there for a long time in the form of each individual's initials. I do not want mine there.

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