Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is also important to realise that more than 500 nurses and midwives on the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland, NMBI, register have signed a petition to call on the Minister to protect freedom of conscience and support the amendments relating to it. Nurses and Midwives for Life Ireland has claimed the Minister, Deputy Harris, and the leader of Fianna Fáil, Deputy Micheál Martin, have refused to meet them to discuss their concerns with conscientious objection legislation. If the Minister were to introduce a Bill on hedge cutting, he would take about a year's worth of consultation within that sector before he brought the legislation through. It is phenomenal. For such a Bill, the stakeholders of that particular sector would be consulted for a year and yet these doctors, nurses and pharmacists have all been denied access to discuss directly with the Minister the issues that they have. These are the people on whose shoulders the health service sits. These are the people who are filling the gaps created by the disastrous funding in the health service at the moment. Despite this, the Minister, who has spoken about little else in the past two years, is pointing to them and asking them to take the weight on this particular issue.

I spoke to a few of those nurses and midwives and they told me a values clarification workshop is being rolled out in the hospitals, asking the nurses and midwives to reassess their own particular values with regard to the introduction of this service. There is an Orwellian feeling around this, when we are going to people who studied, strove and worked to protect and save life to reassess and re-evaluate their values on such an important issue.

The Minister has been a unifier in many ways. There are 750,000 people on hospital waiting lists, 10,000 people on hospital trolleys last month, 2,500 children waiting over a year for their first mental health appointment and now the people working in that sector are also being attacked by the Minister. He was on the radio today and said that these people had conscientious obstruction, not conscientious objection.

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