Madam, - In Saturday's Irish Times Magazine, Dr Garret FitzGerald alleged that he got insufficient advice on the Fianna Fáil 1983 abortion referendum wording, before accepting it.
He alleged that it was dangerously defective; women would die and he had to change it. He knew, he said, that the effect would be a Dáil defeat but nobody hesitated.
This, he said, was the most moral decision ever undertaken by any Irish government! Maybe that is how Dr FitzGerald likes to remember it. But it is not a factual account. The wording was produced just as the Fianna Fáil government collapsed in late 1982 and an election loomed. Dr FitzGerald publicly stated that he had legal advice and there "could not be a better wording".
He wrote to the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign that, if elected, any government he led would enact the proposal and would do so by the following March, topping Charles Haughey's pledge by a few months. That defused the amendment as an election issue, which is presumably what Dr FitzGerald intended. The spurious claim that the amendment would kill women was first articulated by a Labour minister. Dr FitzGerald, when the vote arose on the issue in March 1983, tried to supplant the Haughey amendment with a totally unsuitable one.
A large segment of his own party crossed the floor and helped carry the amendment, along with Fianna Fáil and a large portion of Labour. This defeat seemed to surprise the Fine Gael leadership as it had refused a free conscience vote until forced to do so at the very last minute. Dr FitzGerald's "most moral decision" was sheer fantasy. The alleged danger of hundreds of women dying per annum due to the amendment never materialised.
And, indeed, in the most recent international report on maternal mortality, up to 2005, compiled by the World Health Organisation, UNFPA and the World Bank, Ireland's maternal mortality was the world's lowest. - Yours, etc,
JOHN O'REILLY,
Stoneview Place,
Dún Laoghaire.