Greg Daly
A prominent Belfast-based priest has rejected attempts to turn an open letter he signed on the issue of Brexit into a push for abortion in the North.
Passionist Fr Gary Donegan was one of 200 leading figures in the broader nationalist community who signed the letter to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar expressing “frustration and growing concern over the deepening nature of the ongoing political crises in the North”.
In the aftermath of the letter’s publication, however, lawyer and activist Patricia McBride – one of the authors of the letter – said it reflected concerns that Stormont had collapsed over the DUP’s refusal to support what she described as a “broad rights-based agenda, including Irish language rights, marriage equality, and reproductive rights”. ‘Reproductive rights’ is generally understood by activists to mean the introduction of abortion.
However, Fr Donegan told The Irish Catholic: “that’s not the letter that I signed up to,” insisting that he had signed the letter out of concerns that Brexit could threaten peace in the region.
“Being on the ground all the time, my biggest concern is not so much the economic one,” Fr Donegan told this newspaper, “My fear is that putting in a border, no matter how soft, it gives people in the shadows the opportunity to be able to use that.”
Noting that a recent welcome for the letter from the SDLP’s Colm Eastwood showed how it reflected the concerns of a broad spectrum of nationalist opinion, he rejected the notion the letter represented a distinctly Sinn Féin-led agenda.
Meeting
He said he had recently attended a meeting which included senior representatives on Sinn Féin and felt he could “broadly agree with many things they were saying”. However, referring to the party’s recent decision to push for wider access to abortion there, he said, were certain policies he “could never agree to”.
“Where are the rights of people within Sinn Féin to vote with conscience?” he asked. “There are people at ground level who’d be very upset with some of the stuff said at the Ard Fheis – you’ll see it when they come to the doors.”