Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will share time with Deputies Gino Kenny and Mick Barry.

There has been a lot of talk about compassion this evening; compassion offered by politicians from the establishment parties responsible for the eighth amendment and compassion offered to the brave women who speak out about their experiences of travelling abroad to access abortions. It is an improvement on the shame offered to them in the past by establishment party politicians but it is nowhere near good enough. To be blunt, they do not want politicians' compassion. They want their rights. The Bill has not been brought forward, as was suggested, to cause trouble for the Government or anyone in the Government. It was brought forward so that women can have their rights and the right to control their own bodies.

I was born in 1983, the same year the eighth amendment was inserted into the Constitution. If we look at the debate at that time, and we want to see where the eighth amendment came from, we see the incredible influence of the Catholic Church and right-wing Catholic organisations, such as the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child and the pro-life amendment campaign. The intertwining of church and State is the key reason Ireland was the only democratic State to introduce a constitutional ban on abortion. This connection needs to be broken. We need a separation of church and State, repeal of the eighth amendment, and an end to a situation where the Catholic Church controls the vast majority of our public schools, our hospitals and, clearly, still has massive influence in the conservative political establishment. Even if we had repeal of the eighth amendment, and even if we had similar abortion legislation to that which exists in Britain, but we had a conservative medical establishment and a Catholic influence on sex education, we still would not have access to abortion potentially for those who need to access it.

I was not here in 1983, but there are Members of the House, including the Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, who were Members of the Oireachtas at that time. It was then Minister, Deputy Michael Noonan, on behalf of the Government, who articulated the backward argument of the establishment then in proposing the eighth amendment. He dismissed what he called the secular humanist standpoint, stating there was no common ground for debate with those who believed in the right to choose. There was a voice of reason in the Seanad that day. He described the amendment as a piece of appalling political hypocrisy. That voice was then Senator Shane Ross. Today, he is in ministerial office. He might be in a ministerial car right now. He is prepared to engage in appalling political hypocrisy by voting not to repeal the eighth amendment and instead for a convoluted exercise in evasion designed to kick the can to the next Government.

To finish I will quote the then Deputy, now Minister of State, John Halligan, speaking on 17 December 2014, on an identical Bill to repeal the eighth amendment. He said:

It is about time people stood up and said enough is enough. Can somebody not break ranks over there and say, "I am going to support this Bill for those women who have died and for those women who will have to go to England tomorrow or in the next few weeks; I will make a change and I will stand up for the civil rights of women"?

Wherever Deputy Halligan is, it is his turn to stand up.

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