Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Minister that some of the media commentary has been very unhelpful. However, I do not believe his points about extremes in the debate. The reality has been, as successive opinion polls have shown, that the majority of Irish people believe a woman should have access to a termination in a wide range of circumstances where her health is in danger, where she is the victim of rape, in the case of fatal foetal abnormalities and so on. The recent opinion polls also indicate we should be repealing the eighth amendment, given that most of us were not around when that legislation was brought forward.

What the UN Human Rights Committee actually stated was that we should look at legislating for those circumstances, including looking at the difficulties being caused by the constitutional scenario, which ludicrously and appallingly equated the life of a grown woman with that of a foetus. That is what it asked us to look at; that is the truth and I am sorry if the Minister does not like it. I am asking him, as a young man, if he thinks it is a little ridiculous that we enacted legislation that would only ever deal with a tiny minority of women who needed to secure an abortion where their life was in danger, when, for each of these women, there are thousands of other Irish women every year whom we say have a constitutional right to travel to England or Holland for an abortion, but they cannot access that medical treatment here at home. Does the Minister, as a doctor and a young man, think that is an abomination in the modern era?

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