Healy-Rae’s remarks ‘hurtful’

COMMENTS from Danny Healy-Rae during a Dáil debate on abortion have been labelled as ‘incredibly hurtful, revolting and really disgusting’.

The pro-life Kerry TD on Tuesday night commented on remarks made by Health Minister Simon Harris, who had said it was ‘terrible’ to think of a woman travelling home from the UK after a termination ‘with their loved one in the boot of a car’.

Mr Healy-Rae said: ‘I do not know what he meant by it, but the little dead baby did not feel very loved… I was very hurt when I heard the Minister saying something like that.’

Claire Cullen-Delsol, a member of the Terminations for Medical Reasons campaign group, told the Mail that she and other campaigners had been trying to help a woman in a distressing situation when she learned of his comments.

‘I couldn’t get my head around the callousness and the insensitivity,’ she said. ‘It was an incredibly hurtful and really disgusting comment.’

She praised the general level of discourse during the discussion in the Dáil prior to that, but said the Kerry TD’s remarks had been like ‘a body blow’.

‘It was something completely out of left field compared to the rest of the debate,’ she said, adding: ‘For somebody to take the worst moment of your life and use it against you, and for that person to be an elected TD, there aren’t any words that can adequately describe how hurtful and how wrong that is.’

Mr Healy-Rae, who reiterated on Tuesday his belief that ‘once a baby is conceived, it has a right to live’, also referred to one-time US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during his remarks and said ‘what if someone like’ her came into office in Ireland, adding: ‘She said that it would be fine to abort babies up to eight and a half months.’

Ms Clinton is regarded as pro-choice but she has supported late-pregnancy restrictions on abortions, with exceptions for the health of the mother and the foetus.