Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I commend the Bill. I welcome the people in the Visitors Gallery and I thank them for all the hard work they have done on this issue. This amendment is fanciful and deliberately tabled to allow access to people within a building and within the proximity of a clinic. It is laughable, if it was not so serious and the sinister reasoning behind it was not so serious.

Anyone with a basic rudimentary understanding of criminal law will know that there are two elements to the prosecution of an offence. For somebody to be found guilty of an offence, he or she has to have the mens reaand actus reus, a guilty mind and guilty act. Where two people are having a conversation in a coffee shop and it is overheard, who is going to report or prosecute that? Where within that would the two elements that are essential for the prosecution of a criminal office be found? They would not be found. It is akin to a mother or father saying to a child, "If you drop that, I'll kill you", being prosecuted for threats to kill and cause bodily harm. It is as fanciful and ridiculous as that. It is tabled to deliberately give a platform here to absurd, insulting and offensive notions, as stated by Senator Moynihan and my colleagues. It should be utterly rejected in its spirit, as well as its intent.