Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber. I pay tribute to almost all the members of the committee, who put in a tremendous amount of work. Regardless of their own opinions, they treated each other with respect, for the most part. I pay particular tribute to the Chairman, who behaved tremendously well throughout. I say that as someone who rarely gives praise to Fine Gael but it is well deserved.

I will begin by referring to the 1983 referendum. I remember it well and I suspect the Minister of State does too. It was my first foray into politics as a 17 year old. I stood with the anti-amendment campaign as did my party. It was a horrible time, a time when many people, women in particular, felt suffocated by an all-encompassing campaign that relied on the surface on bright papal colours and slogans like "Yes for life, Baby." Underneath there were anti-choice groups such as the Life Education and Research Network, LEARN, telling people "We must remember that those who choose to travel to Britain for abortions do so for social reasons". It is quite a shocking statement. Equally shocking, incidentally, is any reference to choosing abortion for lifestyle reasons. I was quite taken aback to hear that in this Chamber. We have to remember these dark times. Then we had the infamous banner which said "the abortion mills of England grind Irish babies into blood that cries out to heaven for vengeance". That is what we had to put up with at that time. It is no wonder it was a campaign with no tolerance for people who held a different a view. It was a campaign that had open contempt for those of us arguing that the Constitution was no place to deal with complex issues around women's health. The previous year in 1982 I remember a girl on our school bus; she was a couple of years younger than me and she just disappeared one day. She could not have been more than 14 years old at the time. We gathered later that she had become pregnant and there was a suggestion it could have been incest. We never knew for sure because we never saw her again. That is how matters were dealt with in those days. Women and girls who found themselves pregnant were simply removed from our society. That was not in the 1950s but in the 1980s. A couple of years later when I went to college in Limerick, I lived beside the Good Shepherd Convent, which at that time was a prison for women who became pregnant. I did not know that because I was new to the city. I walked past it every day in blissful ignorance. They could probably hear me and my mates come in late at night, doing what young fellows do when they are at college. They were a stone's throw away from us, locked up because they had committed the sin of becoming pregnant but, not to worry, they were kept busy working as bonded labour in the convent dry cleaning business during the day. Again, this was all in the 1980s.

The only politician of note in Limerick to speak out against the proposed referendum was Jim Kemmy. After a vicious campaign of vilification, he lost his seat in the November 1982 election, ironically to a pro-life Labour Party Deputy. Jim Kemmy was on the right side of history on this issue, as was Dr. George Henry, the then master of the Rotunda, who, during that heated sectarian debate, had the bravery to say if the amendment was passed he failed to see how it could be possible to treat a mother with a serious illness knowing it would damage the foetus. How right he was. His expert opinion as a medical health care professional was ignored, just as hardcore fundamentalists today tell us to ignore the advice of our medical experts across Ireland. We cannot and should not ignore their evidence any longer. That is what the Oireachtas committee was tasked with considering. We were to bring in medical and legal experts to the committee to discuss the recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly. We were to then make recommendations to the Government on the basis of that evidence. The evidence we received from our constitutional experts made the case many times that the Constitution is not the place for specific medical grounds to be enshrined and neither is it the place to regulate best medical practice. It is for these reasons and several others that the committee reached a conclusion that Article 40.3.3o should not be retained in full. That vote was taken and passed on 18 October at the conclusion of module 1. We then voted in December to recommend repealing and removing Article 40.3.3o from the Constitution in its entirety. The current situation whereby a woman can only have an abortion if she is otherwise going to die is simply not tenable in any society that is serious about protecting and respecting the lives of women. Professor Arulkumaran, president of the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, explained to the committee that risk with regard to the life of the mother is something that can escalate in minutes or in hours. The current law does not allow our medical experts to act until it may be too late for a woman's life to be saved. Crucially, this testimony was tested and supported by every single medical expert who came before our committee. It was further supported by Dr. Rhona Mahony, the master of the National Maternity Hospital, who compared the current legislation with a situation of medical roulette with a woman's life. Doctors are mandated by the law to wait until the very moment at which a woman's illness turns from a risk to her health to a risk to her life. This goes against all other aspects of best medical health care. I ask Members to think of a loved one of their own - a partner, daughter, sister or niece - and ask themselves this question: if that person was ill or sick, would they want a doctor to have to wait and play medical roulette with her health until she was dying before they could intervene? We must be prepared to trust our doctors and medical professionals. It is plain and simple as "the eighth amendment creates unacceptable clinical risk" for women. That is a direct quote from the committee proceedings. That is why all of us, regardless of political party should support the call to repeal the eighth amendment.

For these reasons, I also fully support the committee's recommendations to allow for terminations when the mother's physical or mental health is at risk. In 2018, surely it is time for us to trust women. We have to face reality. Ireland is not an abortion-free country. Women in Ireland have abortions all the time. Each day, ten women travel for terminations. Some of them are probably boarding a plane this evening as we have this debate. The vast majority of these women receive no after care when they return home. We also know that 1,800 abortion pills were supplied to Irish women over the Internet by one provider alone in 2016. This is the reality right across our island. To put these figures into context, it is estimated that about 12% of Irish women of reproductive age have had an abortion. That means all of us, whether we are aware of it or not, know somebody who has had an abortion. These are the people the State has failed and continues to fail. There is a gross hypocrisy at the heart of the so-called pro-life campaign. As Professor Arulkumaran said, everybody is an abortionist. Some support legal abortion. Those who do not support legal abortion support illegal abortion. Irish women will continue to access abortion. I want their medical needs to be provided for in Ireland in our hospitals.

I will deal with the recommendation that the law should be amended to permit termination of pregnancy with no restriction as to reason with a gestational limit of 12 weeks. The Citizens' Assembly came to this conclusion because it could see no other way to assist women who had become pregnant as a result of rape or incest. After hearing the medical and legal evidence, our committee came to the same conclusion. The alternative would involve requiring a woman to provide some kind of proof or certification she had been raped. I cannot imagine how that could be an acceptable means of dealing with this issue. The 12-week issue also raises another fundamental question. If someone I know finds herself in the early weeks of pregnancy and passionately believes she is not ready or able to continue with the pregnancy, should any man or woman or indeed the State have the power to insist she must continue with that pregnancy until full term? Women must always have access to the best medical health care in a safe supporting environment.

The ancillary recommendations deserve careful consideration and support if we are ever to achieve a health service fit for our people and women in particular.I fear that these recommendations will be ignored. I want to highlight the huge inconsistencies in how sex education is delivered in this State and the need for progressive policy in this area, which is applied regardless of the so-called ethos of the schools. This issue brings up the glaring anomaly of a State that claims to be a republic but still allows religious control of the majority of our school system.

In 1987, Christy Moore wrote a powerful song called "The Other Side" which contains the lyric:

... men in black will claim a social order

Frightened women sail to the other side.

Thirty years on the only thing that has changed is that they are more likely to fly than to sail.

Regardless of one's views on this difficult issues, it is time for the Irish people to have their say on the matter. One would have to be 52 years old in order to have voted in the last referendum. This referendum will not be easy. Many challenging conversations will need to be had. It will take courage and real leadership. There is very little sign of this leadership among the Taoiseach's comments last week. I truly hope he does not falter in the same manner that Garret FitzGerald did in 1983, with a half-hearted support for the repeal campaign. The women of Ireland deserve better. They must not be failed again.