Catholic Hospitals must provide abortion services according a Department of Health spokesperson quoted in The Times, Ireland Edition, despite a Government study recommending structural changes to healthcare budgeting that would allow them to opt out.

The recommendation came from a Study Group that Health Minister Simon Harris himself set up to look into the role of voluntary organisations in the healthcare service. Their report was published Thursday and, while the headline item was a suggestion that Catholic hospitals might remove religious symbols and iconography at the request of patients, the report also recommended that budgeting for healthcare might change so that grants could be offered for specific services that hospitals could decide for themselves whether to tender for or not. An onus would then fall on State-owned hospitals to provide abortions, if voluntary hospitals declined to do so.

A spokeswoman for Mr Harris told the Times, Ireland edition, however that he held the view that while individual doctors could opt out of providing abortion services, hospitals could not. “The minister has always been clear that there is an onus on everyone — the government, the HSE and especially service providers — to ensure that an effective exercise of religious freedom by health and social care professionals does not prevent or unduly restrict patients and service users from accessing services to which they are legally entitled,” she said.