Save the 8th campaign removes poster featuring ‘nurse’ living in Wexford
AN anti-abortion poster featuring a Wexford man referred to by ‘The Save the 8th’ campaign as a ‘nurse’ has been removed from the streets.
The ‘Save the 8th’ movement, which originally put up the poster, said it had been removed following a two-week run and it had also taken down a video featuring testimony by the same Wexford man, Noel Pattern, ‘because of online harrasment’.
‘Save the 8th’, which campaigns against repeal of the Eighth Amendment, told the British newspaper The Times it stood by the campaign despite discovering that Mr Pattern, 48, who has an address Wexford, was not a nurse.
It said the main point was that Mr Pattern witnessed something he felt was unethical which had not been disputed. The group said it had wrongly described Mr Pattern as a psychiatric nurse because it misunderstood his healthcare experience.
‘Save the 8th’ had referred to Mr Pattern as a ‘nurse’ in a single article on its website.
It also put out a six-minute video where he referred to his role as a ‘circulation nurse’ and spoke of his experience in an NHS hospital in Ipswich, in the UK, between 2001 and 2005.
In the video, Mr Pattern claimed to have witnessed ‘beakers of babies’ left on shelves after abortions for up to five days outside the operating theatre and said the circulation nurse’s role included making sure the gown of the gynaecologist or obstetrician, who was carrying out the procedure, would be tied up at the back.
Mr Pattern told The Times that he was not a nurse, but the term ‘circulation nurse’ was common language used in operating theatres. He said it was not an official job title. ‘I know care assistants who are referred to as nurses by patients because everyone looks the same and dresses the same,’ he said.
John McGurk, director of communications for ‘Savethe8. ie’, did not respond to a call from this newspaper and Mr Pattern, who lives in Galbally, could not be reached for comment.
But Mr McGurk told PrimeTime last Thursday that Mr Pattern ‘was described as a nurse in a single article on our website as a result of a misunderstanding’.
In a 2009 interview to promote ‘Forgiving Ferns’, a book he wrote on being abused by a seminarian priest in County Wexford over a period of three years, Mr Pattern said he became involved in criminal activities in the 1990s before finding redemption. He said he fled to the UK but was later extradited to Ireland and given a suspended sentence.
‘Save the 8th’ told The Times that Mr Pattern never identified himself to the group as a psychiatric nurse. It said he claimed to had experience in mental health facilities, so the incorrect assumption had been made that he was a psychiatric nurse.