The Tralee Charismatic Prayer Group is as entitled as anyone to contribute to the abortion debate. Its inexpert views arising from suicide risk in crisis pregnancy were considered by the All-Party Oireachtas Committee.
But a key expert group was excluded and, surprisingly, its official position was misrepresented in the worst possible way. No one consulted the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Irish-British professional body to which some 650 Irish psychiatrists belong: someone got their policy wrong instead, and continuously presented it as right.
Facts come and go in the abortion saga. Fact is over 100,000 Irish women have had abortions in Britain: that's not changing. Fact is, however, that whether or not it knows it, the Fianna Fáil/PD consensus has spent five years abusing core expertise about pregnancy, mental health and abortion by using the disputed views of a Tory peer and leading members of the British anti-choice Life Campaign. This reality cannot be ignored.
The psychiatric profession's official position is that abortion may be made available on an individual, regulated basis, subject to careful assessment based on best medical practice. That policy is formulated by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the professional body for Ireland, North and South, and Britain.
Local procedures are obviously subject to local laws, and both Irish territories are reviewing the situation. Irish Medical Council guidelines do not exclude the risk of suicide as grounds for abortion.
Yet tucked away in the all-party report to the Oireachtas is a statement made by Lord Rawlinson of Ewell, a Tory life peer, after his private inquiry on abortion. It misrepresents college policy by attributing to it the view that there is no psychiatric justification for abortion. The psychiatric profession disowned his statement in a row which made headlines back in 1994.
But no one checked the facts in Ireland, or if they did, they ignored them. Not only did the misrepresentation stand, it masquerades as professional psychiatric evidence in the all-party report.
Lord Rawlinson's report was not an official House of Lords inquiry. He set up a committee, in line with privilege, including members such as John Scarisbrick, founder and chairman of the anti-choice lobby group Life, and David Alton, another well-known anti-abortion campaigner. The college nominated perinatal experts Dr Margaret Oates and the late Prof R. Kumar to speak to the committee on its behalf.
Other medical and lay people attended in various capacities, including psychiatrist Prof Patricia Casey, who was not representing the college. Prof Casey had, ironically, been Dr Oates's registrar at one stage; she remains an active anti-choice campaigner. In July 1994, a month after the Rawlinson sittings, the college held its AGM in Cork and granted President Mary Robinson an honorary fellowship. Prof Casey did not attend.
Fianna Fáil opposed the first reading of Michael Noonan's Abortion Information Bill when the effects of the last referendum - other than the people's refusal to exclude suicide as grounds for abortion - hit the legislature. The Bill became law, giving Irish people legal access to abortion information for the first time.
But the impulse to limit, control or possibly misrepresent information persisted. By early 1997, when the threat of anti-choice Independent TDs began to loom large, a Fianna Fáil advisory group faced the uncorrected Rawlinson and proceeded to use it as official College of Psychiatrists policy. The wrong persisted in the interdepartmental committee Fianna Fáil and the PDs set up soon after taking office. The resulting Green Paper gave the misrepresentation official status, and if any civil servant actually spotted the error they certainly kept mum.
Say it often enough, and the spin will stick. Decent people may not know how wrong they've got it by using hearsay instead of fact.
This wrong now stands as right in the all-party's report to the Oireachtas, along with other suspect evidence, such as the minority interpretation of abortion data in the Finnish study I wrote about last month. That distortion or disagreement persists, even though the Finnish authors support legal abortion (and despite Finnish suicide rates approximately three times higher than elsewhere).
At the same time, the all-party grouping went on to restrict psychiatric expertise to four individual practitioners, despite the dominant themes of suicide/mental health arising after the 1992 referendum. Dr Seán O'Domhnaill, of Youth Defence's delegation, Dr John D. Sheehan and Prof Casey were consulted, all, coincidentally, subscribers to the minority view about the Finns. Dr Anthony Clare's analysis reflected the college's data, yet in those chambers he sounded virtually unique.
The College of Psychiatrists was ignored, although the views of other relevant professional bodies, such as the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, were taken. The institute does not belong to an Irish-British professional grouping, as the college does; Tralee Charismatic Prayer Group's claim to have the institute's backing, however, probably arose without its knowledge.
The College of Psychiatrists is now considering how best to tell the Taoiseach about this gross misrepresentation. How many people were misinformed? And why do referendum proposals around the issue of suicide represent the views of the Tralee Charismatic Prayer Group more closely than the views of professional psychiatry itself?