Last Night In New York

The vigil for Savita Halappanavar outside the Irish Consulate in Manhattan yesterday evening.

“Those of you who are not Irish, let me ask you something, and I ask you this with a heavy heart, because I do love my country, and I would love you to go there, and to love it too: I ask you to revise the positive impressions you may have had of the country up to now. Or, rather, park them; put those impressions aside. Because this overpowers everything. This changes everything. Until this Government does what the people are calling on it to do, I cannot in good conscience ask you to think well of my country, or to travel there. I can point you towards those 20,000 marchers in Dublin, certainly, and I can tell you how proud they make me, how moved I was by the photographs of their gathering – the only gathering worth our while until this changes. But nothing seems to worry this Government more than its image on an international scale, and so international solidarity, and international support for these calls for action are vital.

…Campaigners in Ireland have called this Savita’s Law, and tonight we join with the demand that the Irish government address this need to legislate as a matter of the greatest urgency. We are saying to them very clearly, nothing less will do. They must ensure that a tragedy like Savita’s never happens again, and they need to legislate now so that that suffering like Savita’s cannot be allowed to happen unnecessarily in Irish hospitals. And when they do that, I encourage you to think about Ireland in positive terms again.”