Christmas may be over but that doesn’t mean the fancy window dressing has to stop. It only began in Leinster House yesterday.
They have a strange relationship with time in Kildare Street. Some people might think 20 years is a long time to wait for important life or death legislation, but it’s the mere blink of an eye where our Governing politicians are concerned.
After the 1992 Supreme Court ruling in the X case, which determined that a woman has a right to an abortion in Ireland in limited circumstances, including the possibility of suicide, it was up to the government to legislate for that decision.
Fat chance. Instead, they held referendums on the issue. The public gave them a nudge by endorsing the Supreme Court’s view in all of them. Nothing was done.
A decade later, another referendum, with the people again demanding the same outcome. Still nothing was done.
Slow years of court cases, expert committees and countless top-level reports galvanised governments into finding something better to do than the job they were asked to carry out by the public they purport to represent.
All the while our legislators shrugged their shoulders and came to the same, resigned, conclusion: isn’t life a beach? And they bravely buried their heads in the soft sands of Leinster House for fear of injuring their delicate political necks.
It’s a comfortable spot, face down in that sand, because you can’t see the sea right beside you and the unending flow of Irish women crossing it in search of the remedy they instructed you to provide.
Or at least it was comfortable, until the European Court of Human Rights came along with a shovel in 2011 and dug our political leaders out of their sand-locked complacency. It found that an Irish woman’s rights had been violated because the government never gave effect to the judgment in the X case. Something would have to be done now.
Suddenly, the brakes were off. The government burst into action with the trademark urgency of a lame tortoise. An “expert group” was set up, because this matter had to be fully examined in case all the other expert groups and judges of the courts and people who voted in several referendums had missed something over the last 20 years.
And it took us, at warp speed nine, to the Seanad Chamber yesterday morning, where a special meeting of the Joint Committee on Health and Children was taking place. The committee is holding a three-day public hearing to discuss plans to legislate for limited abortion following the publication of the expert group’s report into “matters relating to A,B,C v Ireland” . The letters stand for the women who took cases to the European Court of Human Rights.
The committee will listen to submissions from various interested parties in an opinion gathering exercise. It will then compile a report of the proceedings and give it to the Government. The committee will not be making any recommendations. The Cabinet will then go ahead and do what it wants to do, which is legislate.
Presumably, when the wording is issued and all hell breaks loose, the Government can point to all the preparatory work done and how it listened carefully to all points of view. Didn’t they hold this three-day hearing? They could have emailed their submissions to the relevant people, but this exercise in the Seanad looks far more impressive. A lovely bit of window dressing.
We had two people from the Department of Health and the Medical Council to start off with. They weren’t committing themselves to anything – it isn’t their job to legislate.
The president of the Medical Council was circumspect, although he did come down in favour of legislation. “I regret that Deputy (sic) Crown thinks my last answer was less than expansive,” he purred after Senator Crown felt he was being less than forthcoming.
At one point, it looked like Nama was going to involved. Instead, it was a bizarre tangent about NALA, the adult literacy agency, and how the Medical Council is anxious that its guidelines are written in plain English.
The submissions from the medical professionals were most compelling. They spoke as people who deal in the day to day business of life in maternity wards. Dr Rhona Mahony, master of the National Maternity Hospital, was a model of straight talking. She wanted to go about her work without legal uncertainty. Her abiding aim is to ensure the wellbeing of mother and baby, but that is not always possible.
She will do what she has to do to save a woman’s life. “I want to know that I will not go to jail and I want to know, by the way, that she will not go to jail either.”
Her remarks were echoed by Dr Sam Coulter Smyth, master of the Rotunda and Dr Mary McCaffrey of Kerry Hospital. They stressed all along they were in the business of saving lives and not ending them.
But the questions from politicians were complicated, and at times almost accusatory. Fine Gael’s Terence Flanagan took exception to Dr.McCaffrey talking about “a patient.” Were there not two patients involved?
Two more days of talking to go. Two more days of window dressing and distraction. And all the while, the women continue to cross the Irish Sea.
