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

In about an hour's time the Taoiseach will frogmarch his backbenchers in here to vote down my Private Members' Bill, a Bill designed to support families who receive the devastating diagnosis that their pregnancy has a fatal abnormality incompatible with life. My Bill enables them, if they feel they cannot continue with that pregnancy, waiting for the baby to die, to terminate it here in Ireland surrounded by their families and friends. Instead, the Taoiseach proposes inaction, condemning those people to a lonely journey, most likely to Liverpool, surrounded by holidaymakers and businesspeople while the bottom falls out of their world, and then to come home and have the ashes sent in a jiffy bag in a DHL van.

It is cruel, inhumane, torture and a violation of human rights, and it is avoidable. Some 80% of the people have said they want the Government to do something about this. The three masters of the maternity hospitals, the United Nations Human Rights Commission and 43 legal experts have said it can do it. Not just that, 50 Deputies, including half of the Cabinet, have said something must be done. What is that something and who is going to do it? If not us, who? If not today, when?

People are sick of excuses and the only reason advanced to oppose this is the allegation that it is unconstitutional.

The Taoiseach knows that is rubbish because only the High Court and Supreme Court can adjudicate on whether something is constitutional and they have not done so in this instance. All the Government has is the opinion of the Attorney General. With the greatest respect to her, she is not infallible; she is a human being and, at least once, she has been proved wrong, specifically in the case of the children's referendum. These issues are too important to leave it at that. I want to see her opinion before this vote because so many people disagree with it.

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