I am sorry that we are back again arguing about a further attempt to deal with the complex abortion problem by constitutional juggling rather than by legislative action. While the electorate are once again being dragged into this quagmire, more than one-fifth of all Irish first pregnancies and three out of every eight non-marital first pregnancies are being aborted in Britain, many of them at a much later stage than is normal elsewhere.
Most people may have forgotten how this whole sequence of constitutional amendments on abortion started. Let me remind you. In April 1981, as leader of Fine Gael in opposition, I was approached by a group of people who said they were concerned about the possibility that the Supreme Court might at some stage copy the US Supreme Court's decision in Roe v Wade which had declared State legislation against abortion to be unconstitutional.
It seemed to me highly improbable that our Supreme Court would ever challenge the existing legislation on abortion, the British Offences Against the Person Act, 1861. But then most people in the US had probably thought the same thing about their Supreme Court.
As it seemed to me sensible that this complex matter be left to the legislative power of the Oireachtas, I agreed that an amendment along such lines should be introduced and later confirmed that it would be included with other constitutional changes which I proposed to introduce with a view to removing sectarian elements from our 1937 Constitution.
In the short period of my first government, from July 1981 to January 1982, there was no time to deal with this matter. But in opposition, during the equally short-lived Fianna Fáil government of 1982, Charles Haughey announced that, if re-elected, he would introduce a constitutional amendment on abortion.
His proposed wording was: "The State recognises the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right."
I had no desire to fight an election on the issue of abortion and, given that the wording appeared non-sectarian and I had reason to believe that it had been approved by the Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin, I unwisely accepted it without first securing legal advice.
In government three months later, the attorney general, Peter Sutherland, advised that this wording was doubly defective. On the one hand it might be interpreted by the Supreme Court as excluding operations such as those dealing with ectopic pregnancies that had always been permitted by the State and accepted by the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, it could be interpreted by the court as permitting abortions in other cases.
The Labour Party opposed this wording from the start. When I brought the attorney general's advice to the Fine Gael members of the cabinet, it took only 20 minutes for all to agree that, in particular because of the possible risk now revealed to the lives of mothers protected by the existing laws and practice, the wording would have to be changed or a new amendment devised. This moral consideration immediately outweighed our realisation that some government backbenchers might be misled into backing the existing wording despite its flaws and that, consequently, our government might well lose the subsequent Dáil vote on a revised amendment as well as the referendum vote on the defective wording, thereby suffering much political damage.
The alternative wording that the government parties then adopted sought to secure the objective that had been proposed to me by the "pro-life" group who had come to see me a year earlier to ensure against any possible Irish Roe v Wade decision by the courts. Our wording was: "Nothing in the Constitution shall be invoked to invalidate or to deprive of force or effect a provision of the law on the grounds that it prohibits abortion."
HOWEVER, instead of welcoming this clear and unambiguous endorsement of the proposal it had put to me, the group chose to ignore the constitutional advice and persisted in backing the dangerously ambiguous Fianna Fáil wording. I realised then that in reality their agenda was quite different from that which they had disclosed to me a year earlier - they were actually seeking to deprive the Oireachtas of its legislative role in this extremely complex issue.
On a journey to Galway I called on a bishop whom I knew to ask him to convey to his colleagues a request to meet them to explain the problem which had arisen and to discuss the steps we were proposing to take to deal with it. To my absolute astonishment, the Hierarchy flatly refused and fobbed us off with contact with an agent whom it would appoint.
It soon became clear that the bishops' refusal to meet the government reflected a recognition that if they had met us they could not have contested our good faith, nor could they have resisted the logic of the constitutional arguments against the defective amendment.
By rejecting such direct contact and refusing to hear at first hand the government's reasons for rejecting the flawed wording, the Hierarchy felt able to reject the attorney general's view of the flawed wording, claiming a superior grasp of constitutional law.
When they were proved wrong on this a decade later, they offered no apology for having thus misled the electorate on a constitutional matter outside their competence. In the light of these past events, I am totally opposed to yet a further attempt to resolve this abortion issue by way of constitutional amendment.
The electorate is now being asked for the third time to burn its fingers by accepting a constitutional provision designed once again to limit the capacity of the Oireachtas to legislate in relation to a complex issue, which experience has shown not to be capable of being definitively settled by constitutional action.
Let us not compound past errors by accepting yet a further erosion of the legislative function of the Oireachtas, in defiance of the principles of representative democracy. The bankruptcy of the Government's case for this amendment has been starkly exposed by the Taoiseach's ill-tempered effort to frighten the electorate with a claim that, if he doesn't get his way on this constitutional amendment, he will have no choice but to legislate for a liberal abortion agenda. Given the existing constitutional provision, this threat is patent nonsense.
The irrationality and intemperance of his statement adds to the many reasons for voting against this misplaced constitutional proposal, which I certainly propose to do.