Govt trying to distance itself from abortion move – bishop

The proposed ‘citizens’ convention’ on repealing the right to life from the Constitution is a ruse to allow the Government to deny responsibility for its recommendations, Elphin’s Bishop Kevin Doran has warned.

The bishop’s comments followed an announcement that the Fine Gael-led minority government’s Programme for Partnership includes a commitment to establishing a ‘citizens’ convention’ to examine the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution and a number of other matters.

“The idea of referring it to a citizens’ convention is simply an attempt to distance the Government from whatever is recommended,” Dr Doran said in a homily preached in Knock to members of the Irish Guild of Catholic Nurses and the Irish Catholic Doctors Association, describing the proposal to repeal the life equality amendment as being “about opening the door to a liberalisation of abortion which is not consistent with the truth about the human person”.

“In my view, the setting up of the citizens’ convention is really just about window dressing and making it look democratic, and I suppose to some extent to distance government from it, so that whatever the citizens’ convention comes up with the government can say ‘that wasn’t our idea, that was their idea’,” he told The Irish Catholic.

Tendency

Criticising a tendency to talk about unborn babies with life-limiting conditions as though they are already dead, he observed that “babies with life-limiting conditions are patients in need of care”, continuing, “While one obviously has to have huge sympathy for their parents who are faced with the challenge of a sick child, that doesn’t negate the fact that the child is a sick child and remains a child until it either grows up or dies, and of course the reality is that some of them do grow up.”

The bishop added that five of the six TDs in his diocese had promised to vote against plans to repeal Ireland’s constitutional protections for the unborn, and said, “I hope that the kind of arrangement that has been put together to make this Government work will not preclude these people from taking a principled stand in defence of what they believe, which is that every human being has a right to life.”