Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

-----an Ireland where anyone would turn to women and say, "We do not believe you; you must be lying." It is a disgrace. Those kinds of accusations have no place in today's Ireland. We have a dark history in this country, and we need to be cognisant of that when we talk about safe access to healthcare for women because, by God, we did not have it for a very long time throughout our history.

Now, let us talk about your insistence on being right up in women's faces in the universities when they want to access health services. I went to UCD. Here is the deal. You can take your placards and all of those awful insinuations you are making about women trying to access health services and you can stand on the bridge on the N11 if you want. No problem. You can stand there and you can wave your placards around to your heart's content. You can come into UCD and you can wave your placards around to your heart's content. You can go up to the engineering block, which is where I was educated, and you can march around it in circles with your placards all day and all night. In fact, you can go to the lake and you can take your placards out into the lake on little boats if you want. Nothing in this legislation impedes you from doing so because none of those areas is within 100 modest steps of the health centre. All we are asking is that when you have got your placards on the bridge, and you have got your placards at the entrance and you have got your placards at the engineering block and you have got your placards at the lake, that you do not come within 100 steps of the health centre where women are accessing legal health services. If you have a problem with leaving women the hell alone within 100 steps of them trying to access a health service, then tough. We will put this to a vote. I will be very happy to see how Seanad Éireann votes on this, but under no circumstances will I be accepting these amendments.