Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I agree with Deputy O'Reilly on everything. It is a strong signal the Minister is here on the last sitting day to deal with this important legislation. We are talking about abortion and termination services, but we are really talking about health services and ensuring people have unhindered access to what are lawful health services and do not have to deal with harassment and intimidation. It is as simple as that. We are talking about hospitals, clinics and healthcare settings. None of that is acceptable. This does not take away from people's right to protest and all those other particular issues, but this is about healthcare staff who can be intimidated in their place of work or on their way there. This is also about women seeking to access services. We do not necessarily know the circumstances people are dealing with. It is up to them. Nobody needs to be dealing with this level of harassment and intimidation. It does not serve any purpose.

It is a pity and we should have been here at an earlier stage. It is not the first time anyone has ever said that about legislation. We are in the right place and we just need to move it on. Deputy Costello spoke about gardaí needing specific legislation and that they need to know what charges someone is going to be held on if they are carrying out acts we are looking to make illegal. An issue raised during pre-legislative scrutiny was recording the warnings. People can get multiple warnings at different locations. We need to clean up that piece so we can produce something that has the impact we want it to.

I also thank Together for Safety for a really powerful piece of advocacy work. I thank Senator Gavan who worked alongside many other progressive forces in moving his legislation through and now, finally, we have this.

The geographic barriers to services have been mentioned by nearly everyone who has spoken. There are wider issues with health services across the board. We all talk of workforce planning, but the difficulty with consultants and so on is it takes a number of years to bring that to fruition. However, across the board I think everyone accepts we must get into the world of doing the geospatial planning piece that is required when looking at where there are gaps and disparities in services or where they do not exist. We should also produce extra route maps through the education system and all the rest of it to allow us furnish all the health carers who are required so we can provide people with the services they demand.

This is definitely useful legislation. There will be a need, which I am sure amendments and whatever else will be able to deal with, to ensure we can be certain people have safe and unhindered access to what are lawful services. It is a piece of the jigsaw we have not put together. We owe this to women, to wider society and we need to do it. We need the optimum legislation to deliver the optimum services, while looking at where we have gaps in services and whatever can be done to remedy that.

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