Committee hearings on abortion

Since we last mentioned abortion things have come a long way. The death of Savita Halappanavar, the ensuing vigils and protests, the leaking and publishing of the expert report, the reintroduction of Clare Daly's bill and the three days of public hearings by the Health Committee of the Oireachtas have all put abortion back at the heart of Irish politics. So much has happened and been commented upon that I'm not going to rehash old news but I do want to make a few comments on the Oireachtas hearings that have been held over the last three days.

Despite being in work this week, I managed, thanks to the HEAnet stream, to keep up with most of the proceedings in the Seanad chamber. From a bill drafting and parliamentary politics point of view, I feel that the public consultation was a bit of a waste of time. Despite James Reilly saying the contributions from the witnesses would feed into the process, I really get the feeling it was all a bit of a show to let the various groups feel like they had their day out.

That said, what the sessions did show is that is is possible to have a discussion about abortion without degenerating into school-yard name calling and bullying within a few minutes. Much of the praise for that must go to Jerry Buttimer who ran a tight ship as chair of the committee. But also a certain amount of begrudging respect must be shown to the TDs and Senators, especially over the course of the first two days who participated in a dignified and thoughtful way to the debate, Billy Kelleher and Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin in particular.

The first two days, consisting of medical and legal opinion was pretty straight forward. I did learn that there are about 30abortions carried out in Ireland every year and that fatal foetal abnormalities could potentially be terminated according to the definition of life in the Constitution and Supreme Court judgements. I particularly enjoyed the session with William Binchy and Catherine McGuinness which consisted of a lot of mutual respect but also pretty direct disagreement between the two witnesses.

Day three, featuring religious and other advocacy groups was always going to be the most pointless and divisive and thus it proved. Yet again the protestant churches came out looking the best, with the strongly entrenched position of the Catholic church looking more and more out of touch with the general population. I was a little amused to catch a glimpse of Ronan Mullen in the camera shot while the representative of the Muslim community was quoting from scriptures. Mullen didn't seem to be too impressed. As usual, Mick Nugent of Atheist Ireland went in a bit too aggressive for my liking but I guess that's just his style.

Having long debates with the pro-life and pro-choice advocates was an even bigger waste of time. Everyone knows exactly where each group stands on the issue and all it provided was an opportunity for some snide remarks and loaded questions from all sides. Particularly unpleasant were the contributions of Terrance Flanagan and Fidelma Healy Eames in the final session.

So now that's out of the way, we have to sit back and wait for a bill to be drafted. Luckily one witness, Dr Simon Mills, has already done the hard work and submitted a draft bill to the committee for their consideration. I imagine the issue will be let lie for a while as the EU presidency gets up and running but we should see some further movement in about March I reckon. We could still have a new law signed by the summer recess bringing some closure to 20 years of X.

PS - I'm waiting for the transcript before discussing the issue of gender selection that was brought up in the final session. I missed hearing the details at the time and have only seen the comments on Twitter.

May you live in interesting times

So as one might imagine, the last week has been one of those glued to the coverage week as various storylines were picked up again after the long summer break in the political soap opera that is Ireland.

Health

The major plot twist is of course the resignation of Roisin Shortall from her role as junior minister in the Dept of Health. The truth of the matter is that the wrong minister has been forced out in this instance. James Reilly's shenanigans at getting some extra resources allocated to his constituency is exactly the sort of stuff we used to give out about with Fianna Fail and the Healy-Rae clan. What is even worse is his attempts to cover it up with bluster about Shortall's manipulation of the criteria for selection when the paperwork shows that this is patently false.
But the real failing here is with the leadership of the Labour party. Gilmore and his handlers should have marched down to Hawkins House and gone though Reilly. They had the high moral ground here, had public support (except maybe in Dublin North), and most importantly they would have been in the right. Enda Kenny should have been given an ultimatum of Reilly or no coalition and given 12 hours to mull it over. And then they should have had the backbone to follow through. Instead, the wise heads in Ely Place decided to shaft one of our most able politicians for the sake of not upsetting Fine Gael.
I would advise anyone who hasn't heard it yet to listen back to Shortall on the Marian Finucane show from this morning. She certainly doesn't hold back. Now we have Alex White promoted to the open slot in Health. While I am sure he'll do fine, he was actually a very good chair of the Finance Committee and will most likely have to give up leading the Labour delegation on the constitutional convention. We might have been best served leaving him where he was.

Phil Hogan

I don't even know where to begin on this one. Hogan has been a disaster since the day he took office. Between septic tanks, the household charge and the planning enquiries he has been an inverse Midas, where everything he has touched turned to shit. Now the story comes out that he wrote a pretty offensive letter about a family of travellers to some local constituents promising that they wouldn't be housed by the local authority. Whatever about the problem of the Minister interfering in the activities of local government that reports back to his Department, the contents and tone of the letter and representations are a disgrace. He's another one who should no longer be holding office, but instead his loyalty to Enda during the 2010 heave is still being paid back

March for Choice

The one bright light of the last week was today's successful pro-choice march through the streets of Dublin. Despite some well known commentators saying there were less than 30(!) people there, I estimated about 2000 or so marchers, with the organizers claiming 5000. Hopefully this can be the start of a real campaign to get legislation passed on X and ABC before moving on to a more liberal abortion regime not wrapped up in false claims around mother's health. Congratulations are due to Sinead Redmond and the rest of the pro-choice activists. The ball is now firmly in Ivana Bacik's court once the expert report is released some time in the very near future.

Confucius never had it so right - it is a curse to live in interesting times.

The abortion post

I wasn't going to write this post. But then I watched Vincent Browne last night and followed the #vinb twitter feed. And it was ugly. Both of them. So here I am writing a post that I don't really want to because I feel I have to.

Yesterday evening a meeting was held in the Gresham marking the 20th anniversary of the X Case which has lead to the abortion laws, or lack thereof, in Ireland at the moment. I've mentioned this before, but the Irish Supreme Court, the ECHR and two failed referenda have made it pretty clear that the Oireachtas has to legislate in line with the X Case and the more recent C case as well. Following the meeting, Vincent Browne hosted a debate on his TV3 show on the topic, featuring two panelists from each side of the issue.
I'm never going to (can't) have an abortion, I'm not going to have to carry out an abortion, I'm not going to have to professionally council a women before or after having an abortion. But I do know people who have traveled abroad to have them and have understood their reasons for doing so.
I am firmly pro-choice. And that's the key word - choice. Nobody is looking to make abortion compulsory. If you don't want to avail of the service then don't have one. But people have the right to chose and the choice shouldn't have to be shrouded in some faux-medical emergency. We need to move away from the "I was going to kill myself" line of thinking and be open and honest about it. If a woman wants to terminate the embryo in her womb then that's her prerogative and neither the state nor conservative pressure groups should not be allowed control her uterus.
The argument is made that the other half of the equation isn't given a choice - ie the embryo, or baby depending on how emotive you want to make the discussion. this is true. But neither is the embryo when the morning after pill is dispensed. Or the potential embryo when a woman is prescribe the regular pill. Or the potential embryo when every teenage boy spends half an hour in the bathroom. So in having legislated for the contraception and the morning after, society has accepted that a chemical and biological reaction does not a legal person make.
Now all that's left to do is determine where the line is between a clump of cells and a fully fledged person. That change happens, by definition somewhere in the 40 weeks between the initial fertilization and birth and I don't know when that is. However, I would think that the line is somewhere around the time where the embryo becomes somewhat (say 30% survival) viable outside the womb with modern technology to help and I guess that's somewhere around week 20-25. If some knowledgeable medic has the figures I'd be only too happy to change my timetable.
The current scare mongering, to which I was repeatedly exposed last night, was that the X case could allow for full term abortion to occur. Now, having just gone along the pregnancy journey with my wife, there is no way that a woman would last 39 weeks and then say "Fuck it, I've had enough. Let's abort this thing." That is just an asinine statement and exposes the anti-choice campaign for the nutters they are.
The hypocrisy of the Irish abortion regime has to stop. All it is doing is keeping Ryanair and Stena in profits as we export the problem to another jurisdiction. I applaud Clare Daly for introducing her Termination of Pregnancy bill today and hope that the Labour backbenchers support her as they promised to do in both the Election Manifesto and the Programme for Government in introducing legislation for the X case. I will be writing to my local TDs asking them to do so.

Health Priorities

Briefing notes posted on the Dept of Health website at the end of last week make for depressing reading.

They state that Ireland must submit an action plan to the Committee of Ministers before mid June with respect to the ECHR judgement in the ABC case. It also notes that the ECHR decision is binding on the state and that action must be taken to avoid further violations of the Convention on Human Rights. Slightly further on in the 56 page document is a section on Assisted Human Reproduction where the issues on fertility treatments brought up by the frozen embryos case is discussed. So far so good. At least these two important issues are on the Department's agenda

But then at the bottom of the page there is a footnote that says "in light of current resources, a
decision will then have to be made as to which of these issues will be prioritised for
the development of regulation/legislation." This is an outrageous position for the Department to take. No matter what your views on the morals and ethics of either of these two issues, kicking one of them to touch due to cutbacks is not acceptable. You can be sure that plenty of other legislation will be prepared by the Dept of Health in the next period, much of it nowhere near as urgent or requiring the same level of scrutiny and sensitivity. It is this sort of carry on that gets the public service a bad name.

Hat tip to the Cork Irish Examiner for the story.

Campaign Diary Day 14 - Abortion again

Previously I mentioned how the abortion issue was cropping up on the doorsteps mainly in a negative light. Well last night we were out in the Mount Pleasant area between Rathmines and Ranelagh. I knocked at a door just after the woman who lives there arrived back from work. After announcing who I was canvassing for her first question was "what's your stance on the X case?" and I thought uh-oh. Having given her the official answer I prepared to be berated again but to my surprise she said that she was glad that some party was giving a straight answer on the topic and was willing to drag Ireland into the 21st Century.

From there we had a wide ranging discussion on all sorts of social and equality issues before being joined by the candidate for the traditional handshake. Her parting words were of encouragement and that there were a lot of people for whom our stance on X is important. They may not be as vocal as Cóir and the like, but they are out there, and do appreciate us taking a stand for progressive legislation.

Campaign Diary Day 10 - Abortion

Well it was only a matter of time really. As I mentioned before, the abortion issue hasn't gone away and in today's Independent, that well known liberal conservative David Quinn, brought the issue back into sharp focus. Entitled "Any vote for Labour is a vote for abortion", Quinn's rant involves a lot of misrepresentation and twisting of opinions to suit his own view point.

Labour is not for abortion. Labour is for legislating in line with the X case. There is a huge difference between those two statements. The former implies that abortion on demand would become the norm. The latter states that  if in government Labour would bring in laws that back up the rulings of the Supreme Court and the European Court. The Irish people have already rejected referendums on overturning X and so all you can say is that a vote for Labour is a vote for implementing the will of the majority of the people. The 1992 amendment that would remove the X case justification was rejected by 2-1. Since then it is most likely that views have moderated and were that wording to be put again it would be rejected even more strongly.

What is most annoying about this issue is the hypocrisy of parties and lobby groups such as the Iona Institute when dealing with constitutional rights. The crime of blasphemy, while anachronistic, was legislated for because it was in the constitution and the religious right welcomed the proposal because it closed a legal hole caused by lack of legislation. However, legislating in line with the X case, which is what the constitution says we should do, has been left open for almost 20 years.

Either the constitution is the primary document of law of the country or it isn't. You can't have it both ways. From my point of view, I am proud of the Labour Party's stance and look forward to legislation being brought in that respects the view of the majority, rather than continuing with the sham that panders to the Ionas, Cóirs and Youth Defences of this world.

Update (21:30) - this evening I got given a set of plastic rosary beads by a kind gentleman while canvassing in Sandymount to help save my soul. I wonder if I need to declare it on a SIPO return.

ECHR vs Ireland

Yesterday the ECHR returned a judgment against Ireland on that old issue, abortion. Without going into great detail, mainly because I'm not a lawyer, the court upheld the position of the Irish courts where they said that legislation was required to clarify when abortion is legal in Ireland. The problems arose due to the X case in the early 90s and more recently with the C case.

Personally, I am in favour of a pretty open abortion policy, pretty much on demand up to 24 weeks. It's not like abortions will be made compulsory, those who object on moral grounds can choose to have as many children as they want. If a woman who finds herself pregnant really doesn't want to have a child is it better to follow through with the termination or bring an unwanted child into the world? There are already enough children in poverty, neglected or in state care in this country.

The main downside of this decision is that it brings abortion right back to the front of politics in Ireland. With an election looming, the last thing that we need is for SPUC and Youth Defence to hijack the election. The election has to be about financial issues and political reform and so any focus on abortion is just going to be a distraction. Of course attitudes in Ireland on the substantive issue have softened and the Pro Life campaign might find their message not being so warmly received, especially in the under-40 category.

The other issue is that it will bring the anti-EU and anti-Lisbon people back into play pointing out how this is just Europe sticking their nose into an internal matters and that we had guarantees on abortion. This neatly ignores the facts that the ECHR has nothing to do with the EU and that the ECHR is just reinforcing the judgments of Irish courts.