Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-17
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Ivana Bacik (LAB), Dublin Bay South

Go raibh maith agat, a Cheann Comhairle. No woman who lived under the shadow of the eighth amendment will ever forget its impact. Many of us will recall the X case, the A, B and C case, the PP case and the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar. We all know that there are thousands of other women who were harmed and whose lives were deeply impacted by Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion between 1983 and 2018. Thousands had to travel abroad for necessary healthcare. In later years, many self-medicated with pills purchased online and far too many, in the early years, had to resort to using underground phone lines to get abortion information. As students union president in Trinity in 1989, I will never forget taking calls from women and girls in crisis pregnancy who were seeking the phone numbers of abortion clinics in England and had nowhere else to turn. Women who were panicked and desperate would describe their terror to me. Their bodies were no longer their own. Their futures were no longer their own. Due to the eighth amendment, they had to resort to calling a Trinity student’s phone line to ask for help.
After many decades of campaigning, we succeeded in repealing the eighth amendment in 2018 and in legalising abortion here. That was very welcome but far too many women are still travelling. At least 1,500 have done so since 2019. Women across Ireland are still feeling the loneliness of rejection by their own health service, so we must address the barriers to accessing necessary reproductive healthcare. Resources are not the issue. The constitutional ban is gone. What is preventing women from getting the care they need is political squeamishness and cowardice.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-06-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:09+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-17