Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies Wallace and Clare Daly for bringing this issue forward again, TFMR for its continued campaigning work and the Sinn Féin Deputies for giving me some of their time to speak on this issue. I was depressed walking in here at the thought that we were going to have to debate this issue again. I was even more depressed when I discovered that I did not have any time to speak because the rules for tonight's debate are different from the normal ones. I very much appreciate that the Sinn Féin Deputies have given me some of their time.

I was depressed in any event coming into the Chamber because as somebody who has been through a situation where I lost a daughter to fatal foetal abnormalities, it is depressing in the extreme that we have to discuss this at all. For people who receive a diagnosis that a child they want to have has fatal foetal abnormalities is a cruelty beyond words. I am not a believer in a God but when one gets this diagnosis, one feels as if some malign power has singled one and one's family out for cruel and inhuman treatment because something one desperately wants has been taken away in the cruelest possible way. As it is such an intensely personal thing and one is told that this is a one in 10,000 or a one in 100,000 diagnosis, one feels completely alone and isolated and does not realise that even though it is rare, in a general sense, a huge number of people are going through it. It was only because of the bravery of other people - in my case, I never wanted to speak to anybody about it - and the bravery of families in TFMR that I felt compelled, out of a sense of obligation to them and the courage they have shown, to speak out about my own personal situation. Nobody who has been through this wants to talk to anybody other than their family and friends about it.

It is in that context that there is a certain obscenity in the fact we are discussing this and that the people here in a political Chamber or lawyers have anything whatsoever to do with or say about this intensely personal tragedy. It is a treble tragedy because there is the tragedy of losing a wanted child, there is the tragedy of those who have to go to Britain, go through that degrading humiliation of sneaking out of the country and go through all the awful stuff we know about and there is the further obscenity of our having to come in here and make a case to people to stop this cruelty.

The Government should let this Bill pass because not to do so is to continue this cruel, degrading humiliation of people in the most awful circumstances. If there is a constitutional bar and the courts find that, then let us repeal the eighth amendment straightaway. This issue alone means we have to repeal the eighth amendment and we must do so forthwith.

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