Brian Ó Domhnaill (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to accept what has been said. My comments are relevant to the issue of medical procedures. If the Minister and the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists are saying that certain procedures do not occur here, there is a simple solution. It is staring us in the face. The Minister should simply legislate for the procedures that will be carried out by listing them in this Bill. Alternatively, he could show us the money - the regulations - now so that we know by law and by statute that none of those procedures will be carried out here. If we are saying that, and if we are genuine and honest about it, we should have no difficulty legislating for it.

The danger is that if we do not legislate prescriptively here, we cannot be sure that in a few years' time, when we have a new Minister for Health - perhaps the Minister, Deputy Reilly, will have become Taoiseach or there will be a new Government in place - and medical procedures have evolved, the procedures we have mentioned that are used in other countries will not come here. Nobody can predict the future. The only way to define the future is to legislate to define exactly what we want to happen in the future. No Member of this House can say that this will not happen next year, the year after or the year after that. If we do not legislate to prevent it, we cannot say it will not happen. I think that is the point Senator Walsh is trying to articulate. I fully support him. This issue is the kernel of this legislation. If we are the human rights activists that some of us proclaim to be, surely those human rights should not apply after birth only - they should apply pre-birth as well.