Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House and I will pay attention to his response and to the other speakers after me, although unfortunately I cannot be here for the remainder of the debate because of another commitment. I am not just here to defend the right to protest in a range of circumstances but I am also here to defend decent people who want to save lives. Listening to Senator Seery Kearney, I was thinking of an organisation I am aware of and support called Community Connect, which reaches out and in practical ways supports women who find themselves experiencing difficulty during pregnancy. It is also there for women who might regret their abortions and who need other kinds of support, without ever judging anybody because none of us ever has the right to judge anybody else. It is entirely legitimate and worthy to seek to save lives and to affirm the lives of both women and their unborn babies, and that will continue.

This legislation is not constitutional and it is not legally necessary as there is legislation in place to prosecute and punish anybody who would intimidate or harass people. The Garda Commissioner has said as much not too long ago. The reality is that because of the nature of abortion in this country, we do not have abortion clinics per seas there are in other countries, so there is not that direct recognisability between people who want to witness to the dignity of the unborn life and to posit alternatives to abortion and people who are going into hospitals or clinics for a range of different reasons. I am afraid this legislation ultimately seeks to demonise people who want to offer positive alternatives to abortion. It is an attempt to deny there is a legitimate human rights argument in favour of protecting the unborn baby as well as a mother's health and well-being. That counter narrative will always be there as long as abortion is legal in this country.

This legislation is about driving the abortion agenda forward, lest it go backwards, as people wonder about the fact we have an increased number of abortions, with more than 13,000 lives lost since the legislation came in. That is an increase of between 40% and 75%, depending on how one calculates it, on the rate of abortions that would have been taking place, judging by the figures the Government supplied prior to the 2018 referendum. There are questions about the failure to guarantee precautionary pain relief where terminations of pregnancy take place in late pregnancy. There is also a refusal to provide that women would be offered an ultrasound as part of the counselling that is available. All of these things could, in a non-coercive and non-deceptive way, offer people real and positive alternatives to abortion in an attempt to save lives and continue to support women. However, all this is to be denied because there is a desire, not just to nail down abortion services and ensure they expand and continue, but to deprive those who would try in any way to offer an alternative point of view or an alternative source of hope and healing.

As I have said, this Bill is clearly unconstitutional and its sponsors and the Government know it. That is the simple reason that three years have passed since this legislation was promised and it has not appeared. The Department of Health has produced thousands of pages of legislation, statutory instruments and guidelines in the past three years but we are expected to believe that in that time it could not produce a simple two-page and five-section Bill on this topic, rolling the issue on and on. The simple reason for it being stalled is that the Government and the current and former Attorneys General cannot square this proposal with the constitutional right to freedom of assembly, which it clearly breaches. The Government cannot admit this because it has politically sold its soul to pro-abortion groups and NGOs, which it funds and which want this legislation. The Government is terrified of a backlash from them.

The Minister seemed to indicate in a series of responses to questions from Deputy Cairns in the Dáil before the summer that the plan to legislate had been abandoned. There was an outcry by groups against that and the Minister dutifully got back into line and repeated the three-year commitment. With the greatest of respect, that political approach and discrediting of what our Constitution requires brings our legislative process into disrepute. Article 40 of the Constitution "guarantees liberty for the exercise ... subject to public order and morality ... of the citizens to assemble". This Bill would target the constitutional freedom of assembly of a specific group of people. We heard Senator McDowell today in another debate talking about how the Supreme Court struck down legislation on the basis it targeted a specific group of people and did not apply generally. This legislation would do the exact same thing and target a specific set of venues, namely, the ten hospitals which provide abortion services. None of this is permissible under the Constitution because everybody has the right to assemble peacefully and make their point.

Members have talked about Poland. Poland and places in America are the reason abortion proponents are worried because people there are starting to think about the humanity of the unborn. No woman could or should lose her life as a result of the legislation in Poland, which has a clear life-saving provision. I saw this with the tragedy of the Savita Halappanavar case as well. People tried to make the claim it was about Irish law, which clearly contained protections for women, but because of a misadventure in a hospital it gained political impetus. We have heard nothing about the tragedy of what happened to baby Christopher in the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street. What about the fact the law which was crafted and voted for by many Members here led to a misdiagnosis and the loss of a child's life? Will the politicians who campaigned for that extreme abortion law take responsibility for the loss of that child's life? That was a consequence of an overly permissive law and one hears nothing about it.

When the 1983 referendum was passed, the third of the population who were on the losing side were never denied their access to the airwaves and they were never denied their voices being heard.It seems, however, as though the one third of people in this country who expressed their belief that the unborn deserve to be protected, in addition to the mother, are expected to go under a rock, disappear from the airwaves and are not allowed to express their views respectfully and in public. That is what is going on here. That is not good for our democracy or for mothers and their unborn children. I hope it will stop.