Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would say to Senator Sherlock that it is typically not possible to turn around a Government amendment that quickly. I spent many years in opposition, and I have tabled God knows how many amendments. As we all know, the Opposition amendments do not have to go through the same legal rigour. There is a process in place whereby we must have drafters and we must take legal advice in the Department. It also has to go through the Office of the Attorney General. Given that this is a clinical issue, we would have needed to pull the HSE clinicians back in. In that time period, it would have put the whole Bill at risk.

On Senator Mullen’s point, there is no additional information. I am purely going on what Senator Sherlock read out. To write to parents around technical amendments to a Bill and to say this will mean their child can never conceive in the future is pretty extraordinary thing to do but that is just my opinion. Maybe it was simply technically incorrect, but I do not know. Yet, Senator Mullen and I have been around here a long time and we know that people do various things to influence legislation. Certainly, the nature of that did not sit well with me. That was it.