In the aftermath of the vote on Holly’s Bill on Reproductive Rights, I got more text messages than I normally do from friends and family – people wondering why the Bill was voted against so overwhelmingly, or what the problems people had with it was, or why Sinn Féin abstained.
To be honest, it took me and the wider parliamentary party aback, as well. We thought – I think, reasonably – that Ireland’s political system had moved on from a blanket opposition to improving abortion access in Ireland. But it appears that more conservative forces in our politics are activating against women’s rights, to the point where some who were avidly pro-Repeal now seem to be lukewarm on it.
Some Important Acknowledgements:
First of all, this is a Bill Holly has been exceptionally passionate about bringing forward, and while the parliamentary party in the Social Democrats were aligned in doing whatever we could to get the bill passed, Holly and her team deserve all the credit for the work on developing the Bill and bringing it to fruition.
I think it is also important to acknowledge the people who voted for the Bill who didn’t have to: Fine Gael’s Grace Boland and Barry Ward, the Independent Barry Heneghan, and Fianna Fáil’s Catherine Ardagh. Their votes were valuable and needed. They should be applauded.
I should also acknowledge the abstentions on the government benches – people who voted differently from their colleagues at some significant political risk – Fianna Fáil’s Minister James Lawless (the only Cabinet Minister to not vote against the bill), Chris O’Sullivan, and Paul McAuliffe.
Government in Ireland too often lacks courage and conviction, and I want to sincerely thank all those deputies above for their courage and conviction in this vote. An honourable mention, as well, to Minister Neale Richmond of Fine Gael, who was away for the vote but said to me he would have supported the Bill.
In the context of an impending by-election, this really goes to show that while what party you vote for matters, individuals with strong convictions matter, too (shameless plug for Daniel Ennis in Dublin and Míde Nic Fhionnlaoich in Galway, who I know would have voted for this Bill).
So Why Was There So Little Support for the Bill?
Holly’s Reproductive Rights Bill was based on a report published in 2023 by Maria O’Shea. It was a report commissioned by the Department of Health and authorised by the Dáil to review the operation of the original Act that legalised abortion in Ireland. It made a series of recommendations, none of which have been acted on. Acting on those recommendations was a key commitment in our General Election manifesto in 2024, so it was important we sought changes to the law where we could.
A few months ago, a very similar Bill was voted on in the House, one that had been drafted by former TD Bríd Smith. Like Holly’s Bill, it dealt with reducing requirements around fatal fetal abnormalities, the threat to the life of the mother, the 3 day waiting period, and criminalisation of abortion care.
Much to the surprise of the opposition, the government allowed their backbenchers a free vote on the issue, and the margin came very very close: Bríd Smith’s Bill was defeated by only 2 votes [70 Tá; 73 Nil] which stopped it progressing to the next stage of legislation.
The experience of the free vote and the tight margin gave us in the Social Democrats some confidence that we could get some additional reproductive rights enacted in this Dáil. A few of us even went on a lobbying campaign talking to backbenchers of the government parties who we thought might be amenable, to ask them to vote for our Bill. I personally spoke to half a dozen TDs privately about the vote.
There were definitely those that I lobbied that had difficulties with abortion generally, that did not want to see more liberal laws. But I think more were under the impression (false in my view) that the public didn’t care about abortion access anymore, and they didn’t feel it was an important issue to deal with.
There’s also an interesting emerging political dynamic, especially after the perceived surge of right-wing anti-abortion parties like Aontú and Independent Ireland in the aftermath of the fuel protests, in that the big parties are worried about their core centre-right and right-wing votes that are traditionally abortion-skeptical. We know that even Sinn Féin, as a self-proclaimed socialist party of the left, have seen a soft bleed to the nationalist right. So I think it’s safe to say they were all worried in the context of the bye-election campaigns of the signal they might send to right-wing voters who want to halt the “woke agenda”.
This was a calculus we didn’t think would change that drastically since the vote on Bríd Smith’s Bill, but obviously it did.
Why the Bill Died
The biggest reason the bill died was that Sinn Féin abstained.
As my party leader, Holly Cairns, said during the debate after Sinn Féin made its position clear:
”People who fought for repeal will be stunned at the approach that Sinn Féin is taking. I am stunned too…Deputy Cullinane went as far as to say that our legislation lacks democratic legitimacy. That is an absolutely outrageous thing to say. It is based on an expert review of the law.”
We were genuinely surprised, in that we had thought they would follow the voting pattern they had established with Bríd Smith’s bill a few months previously. It’s notable some of the more prominent members of the front bench of Sinn Féin were not in the chamber for the vote: Mary Lou McDonald (who actually has been absent for every vote on every abortion Bill since 2018), Louise O’Reilly, and Mairead Farrell. But it’s also fair to say that the abstentions on this Bill from the Dáil’s largest opposition party was both a dereliction of duty and a major betrayal of the Repeal generation.
Notably, Sinn Féin had no mention of abortion reform or improvements to abortion access in its manifesto at the last general election, so maybe I and others were expecting too much from them.
The voting across parties on the Bill was as follows:
| Tá | Níl | Abstain | Absent | |
| Social Democrats | 11 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Labour | 10 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Green Party | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| PBP | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sinn Féin | 0 | 0 | 33 | 6 |
| Fine Gael | 2 | 30 | 0 | 5 |
| Fianna Fail | 1 | 39 | 3 | 5 |
| Independent | 2 | 9 | 0 | 4 |
| Aontu | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Independent Ireland | 0 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 30 | 84 | 36 | 21 |
Of course, for those of you who are good at doing maths in your head, if Sinn Féin had voted for the Bill, it still would not have passed, mostly because there were not enough government backbenchers breaking ranks. It’s worth taking some time to look at who voted differently from the Bríd Smith Bill, and how, before postulating as to why.
First of all, there were a significant number of people who were absent for Bríd Smith’s Bill’s vote, that showed up for this one and voted Níl:
Fine Gael:
Simon Harris
Hildegarde Naughton
John Cummins
Emer Currie
Fianna Fail:
Micheál Martin
Darragh O’Brien
Cormac Devlin
John McGuinness
Robert Troy
Ind/Independent Ireland:
Noel Grealish
Ken O’Flynn
But there was a pivotal few that changed their minds in the last few months, in particular:
Fine Gael:
Jennifer Carroll MacNeill
Helen McEntee
James Geoghegan
Colm Brophy
Paula Butterly
Emer Higgins
Fianna Fáil:
Jack Chambers
Malcolm Byrne
Naoise Ó Cearúil
Some of these people I know personally, and I’m a bit surprised as to how they voted. If you care about this issue, I think it would be worth emailing them and finding out why they voted the way they did. It’s worth noting most of these TDs would be in the greater Dublin area, a core location for the pro-repeal campaign.
I was particularly surprised by Fine Gael (I know, I don’t know why I expect more from them either). As I explained in my own speech, this Bill was largely an incarnation of the path the then-Health Minister and now-leader of Fine Gael, Simon Harris, sent abortion legislation on back in 2018. It was he who inserted the review into the original Bill legalising abortion in Ireland, and it was commissioned by the Department of Health when Fine Gael was in government thereafter. This is as much his instigation, as it is anyone’s.
But I can tell you specifically how Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, the Fine Gael Health Minister, made her decision, because she told us during the debate. And to be honest, now I’m coming to why I wanted to write this blog in the first place: what she said was extremely frustrating.
The Obstructiveness of a Health Minister
I don’t know Jennifer Carroll MacNeill very well, but I do think she’s normally a fairly competent Minister: erudite, informed, generally willing to work with people, and trying to do her best with a difficult portfolio. But I was genuinely taken aback by her speech in the Dáil and how she tried to dress down our party and lecture us on how to pass law.
I will go line by line shortly, but the biggest issue I had was that the Minister spoke as if she expected the legislation, which was drafted in consultation with professional legislative drafters in the Oireachtas, to be fully ready for enactment at Second Stage (there ten stages to the legislative process in the Oireachtas). The strong majority of her criticism was of the law in its specific wording, rather than its spirit, and as such she spent most of her time in the debate parsing out language rather than debating the principles of the Bill (which is the point of Second Stage). It was truly bizarre, and if I’m honest, it came across to me as an underhanded effort to obstruct the Bill because she actually didn’t want to do any of it (given we’ve been waiting 3 years since the O’Shea report’s recommendations, and the Minister has been in government for over a third of that period, I think that’s a fair inference).
More to the point, virtually any Bill can be transformed via amendment at later stages, in particular at Committee stage (where the Minister and government hold a built-in majority for voting). The government holds – at the very least – an in-built veto on any legislation supported by the Dáil. There was no risk that any part of this Bill would become law without the government’s input, and certainly not without their design being all over this. It was grossly misleading to imply otherwise, and I suspect, a cover to prevent any progress on these issues whatsoever. If they had wanted to water it down to just the 3 days wait or conscientious objection, they could have. But the Minister chose not to. She just washed her hands of having to improve abortion care whatsoever.
But to the substance of the Minister’s contentions: the Minister’s speech outlined 5 major changes she had problems with, saying:
This Bill raises both significant legal and operational concerns and I have to bring those concerns to the House. It proposes five major changes to the existing legislation. I see policy difficulties with four of those changes and legal difficulties in all cases.
One the first major change suggested by the Bill (removing the 3 day waiting period), the Minister said some surprising things: On the one hand, she had no problem with removing the 3 day waiting period. On the other hand, there was a problem with our introduction of a statutory right to a reflection period, in that it didn’t exist previously (yes, we know, that’s why we introduced it). In fairness to her, though, she said this was a drafting issue and could be fixed.
On the second major change, I felt that the Minister full-on gave the House and the public a false impression of what the Bill was doing. Our Bill proposed to remove the requirement for 2 medical practitioners to sign off on a termination in the case of a threat to the life of the mother or her health, essentially making it easier and quicker in the case of emergencies for doctors to act.
The Minister said in response to that part of the Bill,
“There are really practical and clinical reasons that the input of more than one clinician is relevant in this decision-making. Doctors work as a team. Where, for instance, a woman’s life or health is at risk because of psychiatric illness, a cardiology issue or a neurology issue, that will, of necessity, see the involvement of both a cardiologist, say, and an obstetrician. That is just the practical medical reality. Removing or changing that requirement creates an uncertainty I do not believe is helpful.”
Of course, there are instances where a second doctor’s opinion are required for the best care for the woman. Absolutely. Our Bill did not preclude that from taking place. We weren’t outlawing second (or third) opinions. We were merely saying you didn’t have to have 2 doctors co-signing the authorisation for the procedure. In fact, there are cases where it would be preferable to have 3 or 4 doctors involved in the decision, but the current legislation doesn’t require it.
I really felt at this point as if the Minister was being deliberately obtuse. Even beyond the threadbare reasoning here, this was a drafting issue, and one that could have been amended at committee stage by the Minister had she chosen to engage substantively with the Bill.
She further attacked the question of including multiple doctors in a medical decision for fatal fetal abnormalities, saying:
“Again, the practical reality is that two doctors are necessary. There would be an obstetrician involved but there would also be a geneticist or neonatologist, who would be the other doctor identifying the fatal foetal abnormality and the trajectory of it.”
Again, the Bill did not preclude a second doctor being involved, it just removed the requirement. But the Minister didn’t acknowledge that.
The next section, where we introduced Ministerial guidelines, was actually the only time I thought the Minister might have a point: she said “In short, I do not believe it is appropriate for me as Minister, or any Minister, to make clinical guidelines in any context. It is an interference in the independence of the medical profession.”
I’m not sure I fully accept the point – in that Ministers create guidelines all the time and it is very common practice – but I do understand if the Minister says “I do not believe I or any other Health Minister should have this power”. That’s fine, though, she could have voted it to committee stage and just removed it. She could full-on just cross it out, delete it from the bill at committee stage. But instead, she voted against the Bill and did not progress women’s healthcare one iota. By this stage of the debate, listening to the Minister’s arguments was becoming increasingly frustrating.
The next issue she took up was the question of the decriminalisation of abortion care – which is a critical part of the Bill. In sum, right now, if the (fairly restrictive) abortion law is not adhered to, a doctor could be imprisoned for up to 14 years. So if there’s a case that skirts with the law (e.g. an urgent case where they can’t find that second doctor, or the 3 day waiting period brings the fetus past 12 weeks, etc.) then the doctor will default to not proceeding with the termination. We wanted to change that, and indeed the O’Shea report recommended that the Oireachtas does change that. It is a major impediment to abortion access, especially in difficult cases.
In response, the Minister said “What is proposed is a blanket decriminalisation and it is not confined to the woman’s treating doctor but to any doctor.”
Right, so the Minister thinks the Social Democrats are in favour of ensuring there is no circumstance under which any doctor could ever be found guilty of a crime if they perform a termination, even if they are not a treating doctor and are acting in bad faith? That is absolute nonsense. That’s not even what the Bill says: in fact, it puts obligations on doctors to comply with certain provisions of the Act.
But even if that were what the wording of the Bill implies, the Minister could have changed it at committee stage and made it more robust. We obviously would have agreed with that. She has a literal army of legislative drafters in her department. We could have found a way if she had worked with us.
And lastly, the most egregious point the Minister made was that she completely opposed the change to the 28-day viability requirement for fatal fetal abnormalities. We know that there are women travelling because doctors did not want to have to make a distinction on the viability of a fetus with a severe abnormality. We have heard from those women repeatedly. It was absolutely imperative that we legislated so women like that did not have to travel and they could get the care they needed at home in Ireland. Anything else, in my view, abdicated our responsibilities to women and their families at the most difficult times in their lives. And I am really angry that the Minister has not sought to deal with it in any way (as were my colleagues). Other countries have found a way with this; it is simply unbelievable and incredible to me that this would not be possible here.
In sum, I just don’t accept there were substantive issues with the Bill that were so big they could not have been dealt with at a later stage in the legislative process in the Oireachtas. Given a few (quite senior) solicitors and barristers from various parties voted for the Bill (including her own backbenchers), I think there was a way through the issues that the Minister outlined. And I think her contention to the contrary was not in keeping with the spirit of the Repeal campaign of the decision of the electorate on these issues.
Conclusion
It’s just not true that the Bill couldn’t have been dealt with in the legislative process – things are changed as part of that process, sometimes very substantively, all the time. That’s the whole point of the legislative stages. And in my view to say otherwise, to try and lecture an opposition party on the minutiae of a Bill’s wording as a way of blocking progressive legislation for women’s health was regressive, obstructionist, and, in my view, grossly misleading. And it makes me question the commitment of this government, of this Minister, and indeed of Fine Gael, to women’s rights and to ensuring women and their families get the care they need.
So please, email your TDs, the Minister, and the leaders of the parties and ask them why they didn’t support this Bill, and crucially, what they’re going to do to ensure the provisions we were trying to get enacted will be implemented in the future.
If you agree with us, please vote for Daniel Ennis and Míde Nic Fhionnlaoich if you’re voting in the bye-elections. This case shows more than ever that who you elect will have a real impact on real people’s lives – and more Social Democrats will make real and compassionate abortion care a standard in Ireland.
It is long past the time that women in Ireland finally get the reproductive healthcare rights that they deserve. That was the promise of the referendum in 2018. And we in the Social Democrats will always seek to uphold that promise, even if other parties in the Dáil will not.