A Labour party senator has issued a call for the Citizens’ Assembly to be resurrected to deal with the ongoing involvement of the Catholic Church in the running of schools in Ireland. In a message posted on facebook, Labour senator Aodhán Ó Ríordáin said the next constitutional issue for the country to face is to “break the religious stranglehold over Irish education”. In follow-up comments to media he said: “We have 4,000 schools in the State and there are ongoing issues such as access, employment rights for non-religious teachers, school ethos, sex education and so on. The Citizens’ Assembly could deal with these issues together rather than tinkering with existing laws. This could well be a five- to 10-year process, but it’s a model that has proved to be successful in dealing with marriage equality and abortion.”

His remarks were echoed by the Labour leader, Brendan Howlin, who told the Dail that the school patronage issue was “significant for many right now who want choice in the education they provide for their children. The Citizens’ Assembly model would be a very good way to have that debate and to allow all sides to have an input and be tested in an open way.”

In response, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, said “it is certainly something the Minister for Education and I will consider”. He added that the Cabinet had discussed asking a new assembly to look at the wider issues of gender equality and “to come up with a set of proposals to allow us to follow through in many ways on the result of the referendum and deliver equality between men and women in other areas”. Mr Varadkar said there was work to be done on “the gender pay gap, greater equality in pensions and having far higher participation of women on company boards.

The Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin, has expressed his dismay that the country appears “to have obliterated the right to life of all unborn children from our constitution and that this country is now on the brink of legislating for a liberal abortion regime.”

Speaking in Knock on Sunday, he said he was very concerned about the implications for society of interfering with the fundamental principle that the value of all human life is equal and that all human beings, born and unborn, have inherent worth and dignity.  “At a time when scientific and medical evidence is clearer than ever about the beginning of life, we have effectively decided that some human lives – in this case the lives of the unborn – are less significant and deserving of protection than others. We have elevated the right to personal choice above the fundamental right to life itself.”

He added that faithful Catholics could become despondent, but “it remains as important as ever to affirm the sanctity of all human life”, and that the “taking of the life of any innocent human being is always gravely wrong”.

Amnesty International has called on the British government to introduce a liberal abortion regime to Northern Ireland after the Republic voted to remove the right to life of the unborn to pave the way for a radical abortion law. Amnesty’s campaign manager in the North, Grainne Teggart, was speaking on Saturday morning as the vote was still being counted in the repeal referendum. She said the British government can “no longer turn a blind eye and deny us equality”.

“We cannot be left behind in a corner of the UK and on the island of Ireland as second-class citizens,” she said.

“It must not be forgotten that us women in Northern Ireland are still persecuted by a Victorian-era abortion ban. It’s hypocritical, degrading and insulting to Northern Irish women that we are forced to travel for vital healthcare services but cannot access them at home.”

Separately, the London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign have said they will immediately transfer their focus to changing the law in Northern Ireland in an attempt to continue the momentum achieved during the vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment. They said the decisive Yes vote meant there is a strong mandate to continue campaigning for change north of the Border.

Sinn Féin’s leader Mary Lou McDonald said she wanted urgent action to make abortion more widely available in the North, but that change should not be imposed by Westminster.

“I think it would be a scandal if a woman in Dundalk was to have rights and access to services a woman in Newry was denied,” she said, but the change should be made by Stormont, not by London.

Parents of pre-school children in 16 areas across the country are to be polled over the coming weeks on whether they want multi-denominational patrons to take over the running of their local Catholic primary schools.

The Minister for Education, Richard Bruton, announced the plan on Monday. In areas where parents express a preference for non-Catholic schools, Mr Bruton has proposed that the State lease buildings from the church and provide for “live transfers” of schools.

Minister Bruton said he hoped the Church would support his proposals. “I’m confident there’s support within the Catholic Church for this. There’s support in the community. I’m confident this process will evolve well,” he said.

The Medical Alliance for Life has asked the Minister for Health, Simon Harris, to guarantee that medical staff and doctors will not be prosecuted for refusing to facilitate abortions. The published heads of the proposed abortion bill allows GPs to not administer abortions personally to their patients, but obliges them to refer those patients to another doctor who will. A spokesperson for the Alliance, GP, Dr Andrew O’Regan, said they want the Minister “to fully respect and protect the right to conscientious objection for all healthcare professionals and to ensure that nobody can be prosecuted for refusing to facilitate abortion.”

If medical practitioners, nurses and midwives were opposed abortion, then they would be unwilling to be involved in the process and refer women on. “If someone is saying that it goes against my entire conscience and everything I am about, and goes against everything that I understand as good healthcare, then I am not going to refer it either,” he said. “The big buzz word during the campaign was ‘choice’. What about the choice of the doctors who say this isn’t what we signed up for?”

Doctors for Life, another group representing medics which campaigned for a No vote in the referendum, said it would be “a clear voice for those healthcare professionals who do not wish to use their skills against the weakest members of society, of any age.”

“We will not perform any action to deliberately end the life of any of our patients,” said the group in a message posted online after the referendum result.

Sinn Féin TD, Carol Nolan, has vowed to oppose a bill legalising abortion up to 12 weeks without restriction and up to six months on broad health grounds. Speaking to the Irish Times, Ms Nolan confirmed she would not vote in favour of Minister Simon Harris’ proposed legislation. She said: “I won’t be supporting the legislation as my position remains the same, as a pro-life TD who is strongly opposed to abortion.”

Ms Nolan is already suspended from the parliamentary party for having opposed the holding of the referendum on whether or not to repeal the Eighth Amendment. She now faces the prospect of additional disciplinary action which will be decided by the part’s Ard Comhairle.

Former Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael, John Bruton, has urged people to vote ‘No’ in the upcoming referendum on the Eighth amendment.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with Sean O’Rourke, Mr Bruton said he trusts the Irish people to uphold human rights and to be recognise that there are two lives involved. He said the Government was going too far to allow abortion without restriction up to 12 weeks and on the grounds of mental health up to six months. “That is the ending of a little Irish life, a little Irish boy or girl.” While Mr Bruton favours retaining the Eighth amendment in its entirety, he said the Government had other options and could have gone for a more restrictive regime. “I cannot understand why they came up with something so liberal.”

He said lives were being saved because abortion was not available in Ireland. People who might have contemplated abortion but did not have one were then happy to keep their baby when they saw it.

On the issue of pregnancy as a result of rape, Mr Bruton spoke of recovery from a trauma, and said “traumatising somebody is awful, but it’s not as final as killing somebody”.

In relation to babies with life-limiting conditions, Mr Bruton said that mistakes can be made, adding: “We should be cautious … when in doubt opt for life”.

Having a law that gives protection to the unborn in the Constitution is entirely consistent with the general philosophy of the Irish people, he said. “I want to ensure that a baby has the freedom to live, and has the freedom to make choices in its own life having been born, because a baby whose life is cut off before it’s born isn’t free to choose anything”.

A leading group of psychiatrists has said the use of the language of “healthcare” by those pressing for repeal of the 8th amendment is “fundamentally misleading.”  In an open letter published on Wednesday, 26 consultant psychiatrists say the vast majority of abortions under the Government’s plan would involve healthy babies and healthy women: “This is not ‘healthcare’ but something else entirely”.

They point out that 90% of abortions will likely occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, when the law does not require any kind of health ground. After 12 weeks, the proposed law “will conform closely to the law in the UK”, where a physical or mental health ground must be offered as a justification for abortion.

“As consultant psychiatrists, it is the so-called ‘mental health’ ground that particularly concerns us because we know from official UK statistics that 97pc of the almost 200,000 abortions which occur annually in the UK, take place under the ‘mental health’ ground”. In fact, they write, these abortions are almost always for socio-economic reasons, something which the Oireachtas Committee on abortion admitted in its report published last December.

“To use ‘health’ as a justification for abortion, when the vast majority of abortions do not take place on any kind of health ground, inverts the true purpose of medicine and doctors who value their calling should have nothing to do with this. Our Minister for Health, for his part, must defend the true purpose of medicine.”

Tens of thousands of people attended the ‘Love Both’ rally in Dublin Saturday, the last of six regional rallies which took place around the country in recent weeks. According to a spokesperson, the focus of Saturday’s event was the extreme nature of the Government’s abortion proposal and the fact that a Yes vote would inevitably open the door to abortion on demand.

Speaking to the crowd in Merrion Square, Caroline Simons, legal adviser to the Love Both campaign said If the 8th Amendment is repealed, Ireland will go from being a country that protects unborn human life to one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the world. “Let us be very clear, the Government’s proposal is not about abortion in ‘hard cases’, it is about introducing abortion on demand. That’s the stark, sad reality of the proposal brought forward by Health Minister Simon Harris. It is even more frightening than England’s abortion law, where 1 in every 5 babies loses his or her life to abortion”.

She continued: “Simon Harris’s proposal defines abortion as a ‘procedure intended to end the life of the foetus.’ The intent couldn’t be clearer. There is no mention in the proposal of making every reasonable effort to save the life of the baby when carrying out the procedure. The goal is to end a life, not save one. It has nothing whatsoever to do with healthcare.”

Many others addressed the crowd including doctors, parents of babies with life-limiting conditions, women who endured unexpected pregnancies and kept their babies and young people who owe their lives to the existence of the Eighth Amendment. One of those, a young Dublin student, Gavin Boyne, who was almost aborted, told the gathering: “I speak on behalf of all of those Irish men and women who are alive today because of your efforts – to make Ireland a better and more inclusive society where respect for one another starts in the womb.

“On the 6th of May, Dr Peter Boylan launched the Together for Yes national campaign – in Athlone. He described the 8th Amendment as a ‘failed experiment’, and in doing so, has personally attacked – every single person – who is alive today as a result of the 8th Amendment. I – am one of those people.

“I think people like Peter Boylan need to be very careful when they make comments like that and they need to realise the impact their words can have on people who are alive today because of the 8th amendment”.