Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There is a danger that the debate is drifting off in a direction which was never intended. In the Second Reading of a Bill one can suggest what should be in the Bill, one can complain about what is not in the Bill and one can announce what one intends to do on Committee Stage. However, we are gone past that. We are now in a situation I have never seen before, where it has been suggested in an acrimonious way that the Minister did not keep his word. That is not true. The committee sat for three months. One of the first things we did was to eliminate the disability area as a reason for accessing abortion. There was no dissent and everybody agreed to it. The reasons for this have already been put forward by my colleague across the House. It would not be right. I gave an interview to a well known journal at least 20 years ago and I held the same view, and I believe the reasons for that are still good.

The suggestion that, because it is not specifically in the Bill, it is by default going to be in the Bill is not true. People should not be saying things like that. It is totally untrue. The Bill is in line with what was committed to the public in the heads of the Bill published before the referendum, and that still stands. In fact, if we did not follow that line, we could be accused of not remaining true to our word.

The other thing we took out of the proposal at that time was the ability to seek an abortion on social or economic grounds. We took that out without any question because we felt they were not grounds that should be considered and that they were way too frivolous.

I come from a family that had many losses when my siblings were very young. I would have first-hand knowledge of the little boxes some of the witnesses told us about when we heard the evidence this time last year. Far from it being, as was portrayed, that women are callous and cold-blooded and would seek an abortion as if it were for their own satisfaction, in fact, the reverse was the case. That was so in every single case, including the ones of fatal foetal abnormality, where the pregnant woman went out of her way to have her baby, but it was not to be and there was a disappointment because it was not going to happen. From announcing it to their friends in the first instance, it was suddenly an appalling disappointment. They still wanted that baby to be born. They even wanted to have a decent funeral for the baby because it was theirs. What really takes me to the fair at this stage, when I hear the begrudgery that we spent three months listening to, as well as listening to the reports from the people who were directly involved at the coalface, to be suggesting they were cold and callous-----

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