The Minister for Health, Simon Harris, issued a terse denial [1] of Simon Coveney’s face-saving claims [2] to having won restrictions to the Government’s proposed abortion regime. After the debacle of his legislative “two-thirds majority lock” proposal was declared unconstitutional by the Attorney General, the Cabinet, in an attempt to avoid further public criticism of Minister Coveney, agreed an unspecified measure whereby abortion laws would go through a process “above and beyond” the normal legislative scrutiny. According to Sarah Bardon of the Irish Times though, “Nobody is quite sure what that means”.
Minister Coveney yesterday spoke to The Irish Times and said his support for the Government’s proposals was “conditional” and told Newstalk of his expectation that women in the latter stages of pregnancy would require a scan, to determine the age of the unborn child, before a termination can be procured. Both statements were rejected by Minister for Health Simon Harris at a press conference yesterday, who added that he did not intend to spend the next eight weeks of the campaign answering “the same question about individual politicians”.