Madam, - Even now, Barry Desmond (September 15th) does not understand the deep dismay of women's rights activists when, following the first meeting between the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign and himself and the late Frank Cluskey, the Labour Party pair agreed to "consider" PLAC's proposals rather than rejecting them, as his letter implies. This is a matter of public record, not of my recollection.
Prof Cornelius O'Leary contends that my article in your edition of September 8th was "tendentious and inaccurate". This is because he disagrees with my point that the abortion amendment was designed to stifle debate about abortion and generally to hold back the changes which were under way in thinking about women's rights.
My sources for this include the Irish Catholic of April 1st, 1982, which reported on a seminar where "Dublin pro-life activist John O'Reilly \ he believed the Pro-life Amendment to the Constitution was the answer to the abortion question in Ireland. It must be won while the vast majority of Irish people were still opposed to abortion, and while abortion was not too politically divisive."
As to the notion that the setting up of the Women's Right to Choose Group was the catalyst for PLAC, this is not an "undisputed fact". I was a member of this group. There were fewer than a dozen of us. We were no threat to Ireland's anti-abortion law, but we did provide a good excuse for introducing the idea of a "pro-life amendment".
I suspect Prof Joe Lee got it right when he suggested that Garret FitzGerald's constitutional crusade "rouse\ bitter resistance among conservative Catholics, whose resentment at the direction of 'liberal' changes in Irish life crystalised in the 'abortion referendum' of 1983... The emergence of a small but strident Women's Right to Choose Group in 1980, advocating abortion as a female right, supplied PLAC with useful ammunition."
Prof O'Leary sees the debate as remaining black-and-white. But the refusal of voters in two referendums to allow a rolling back of the limited right to abortion won in the X case shows that most people see not the black-and-white arguments of doctrinaire anti-abortionists but the complicated and often difficult reality of women's lives. - Yours, etc.,
GORETTI HORGAN, Westland Avenue, Derry.