‘Don’t turn a blind eye on issue of abortion,’ minister tells TDs

A GOVERNMENT Minister has slammed other politicians who seek ‘the quiet life’ by hiding on the abortion question.

Cork South West TD Jim Daly, a junior minister, criticised the ‘traditional turning of the blind eye to the everyday realities for thousands of Irish women’.

Backing the holding of a repeal referendum, and 12-week no-quibble terminations thereafter – despite hailing from a conservative rural constituency – Mr Daly called for ‘moral courage as a political class’ from colleagues.

‘Success in Irish politics, too often, has been defined by the capacity to disappear when a difficult issue approaches you in the corridor,’ he said.

‘That politics of turning the blind eye and of a nod-and-wink has been the ruination of the country. We need politics with a spine not a soft underbelly.’

Abortion is an everyday reality in Irish society, he said. ‘Another is that we, as legislators, have a duty of care to respond to the reality where thousands of women, most on their own, travel for abortions every year and where thousands more, again often on their own, purchase abortion pills via the internet.’

He added: ‘We cannot, if we are to have any moral courage as a political class, pull the ladder up, retreat into the clouds and hope this issue goes away.

‘The current unregulated abortion system poses a danger to tens of thousands of Irish women. They are the silent Savitas that the State has ignored for too long,’ Mr Daly said, referring to the case of Savita Halapannavar, who died from sepsis in a Galway hospital after requesting a termination.

‘I believe as a legislator, a minister, a citizen, a husband and a father, that the moral thing to do, no matter how politically difficult, is to deal pragmatically and caringly with this issue,’ he added. ‘It is time to take our heads out of the sand.’