Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Four months ago the Minister said he would ask his officials to give timely consideration to ways of better protecting the public from certain crisis pregnancy agencies or counsellors that are providing information that is neither truthful nor objective.

Maybe the Minister and I have different definitions of what we might consider timely. These agencies operate less than 1 km from where we stand and are offering terrified women incorrect, inaccurate and sometimes dangerous advice. I would have thought that timely consideration of a serious issue such as this would have come to some class of a conclusion before now, yet the Minister says it will be done in a couple of months. I put that in the same category as "timely". It is not a definitive framework.

At the time, in the glare of the media publicity and on the back of the good work done by Ellen Coyne everybody expressed outrage yet here we are four months on from this revelation, ten years on from the revelation in Hot Press and these agencies are operating, preying on vulnerable women and young girls and we need to take serious action on this, not timely consideration or in a couple of months, in a while or women have to wait yet again, we need it now.

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