Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

To say the past two weeks have been a sorry saga is an underestimation. In the past nine years, successive Governments have had a chance to get this right but have got it very wrong. We all agree that maternity services in the places where women have children are antiquated. We all agree with that. Those services need to be modernised.

The heart of the debate, and not only in the past nine years, has related to religious interference in healthcare. Such interference has a sorry past. We must look at the past, the present and the future. The past, as I said, has included religious interference in women's healthcare. It has been a sorry past.

In the present, we have a two-tier system, private and public, which causes fault lines across society.

People who live in certain parts of Ireland still cannot get access to abortion services. That is a fact.

We do not know the future and that is why there is some ambiguity regarding the 300-year lease. What we do know is that this generation has thrown the yoke of Christian doctrine away, as well as all of the inequality that existed previously. It has the shape of marriage equality and Repeal, and this generation will accept nothing less than the separation of church and State. Time will tell whether the Government has made an enormous mistake. People may look back in ten or 15 years and ask why the Government handed that land over to a private entity.

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