“If I get a chance again, I’m going to change that aspect of it anyway.”
Micheál Martin is our guest on a brand new Ireland Unfiltered this week and he spoke with host Dion Fanning about a wide range of subjects from his own childhood, to Brexit and his first trip to Northern Ireland.
One subject that also arose was the subject of the Eighth Amendment and the historic referendum which took place in Ireland earlier this year.
Martin shocked many people in January when he came out in support for the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, a move directly in contrast with his party’s stance, who had voted at their Ard Fheis in 2017 to retain the Eighth Amendment.
He had originally expressed his reservations about the removal of the Eighth Amendment months earlier but he explained to host Dion Fanning how he changed his mind on the decision.
“When I met four women who had had abortions as a result of fatal foetal abnormalities – these were women who wanted their children – they came in to the Dáil about two years before the referendum,” Martin said.
“I said to myself ‘I can’t tolerate that’ because they spoke about how they brought the remains of their babies back, or couldn’t bring them back in some instances; that was terrible, and this was our society doing this to women.
“And I said to myself, ‘If I get a chance again, I’m going to change that aspect of it anyway’. And then you move on to rape and incest. If you can’t comfortably defend it yourself, then you can’t impose it on somebody else.
“If you’re not comfortable with it personally in terms of a young woman who is raped or has been the victim of incest and is pregnant as a result. Who am I to impose upon that woman legislatively a legal obligation to proceed and have the baby? You had to examine oneself.”
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