Ronan Mullen is running for Europe. Canvassing at Sallins train station this morning. pic.twitter.com/9B2mv4AGK2
— Conor (@mcgconor) January 22, 2014
Rónán Mullen getting his message out there early for a place in Europe in May.
Previously: Is Europe Ready For Rónán?
Warning: Contains Scenes Of Senator Ronan Mullen Which Some Viewers May Find Distressing.
(Representatives of the Sisters of Mercy meeting the Minister of Education in 2011)
Conor Ryan writing in today’s Irish Examiner shows correspondence between religious orders (including the Sisters of Mercy) and the State.
In a letter to the Minister for Education dated 29/5/2012 Cóirle McCarthy, leader of the congregation states:
In the course of several letters and meetings, I have explained our position that we are not responsible for a 50:50 cost sharing. The Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy has not made any agreement with the Government to pay half of the State’s expenditure in respect of the Redress Scheme and CICA (Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse). This continues to be our position.
Our voluntary contribution in response to the Ryan Report, as contained in our Contribution Document of December 2009, is not a matter for negotiation. We will not be participating in an exercise of valuation or reckoning with the State in relation to those parts of the Contribution which the State has decided to accept, or otherwise.
We are not willing to enter negotiations with Government towards its fulfilment of the commitment which it made in its Programme for Government for the tranfer of school infrastructure, currently owned by 18 religious orders cited in the Ryan Report, at no extra cost, to the State.
Conor Ryan also reveals that 66 schools worth €412m were transferred to the Ceist Trust. CEIST (Catholic Education, an Irish Schools Trust) includes MEP and former GAA president Séan Kelly as a member and Ronan Mullen is listed as being on its board of directors.
Its website states:
CEIST engages with all people of good will to promote a preferential option for those made poor, to take action for justice, and to exercise care of the earth in a spirit of respect and welcome for diversity.
Order told State to scrap vow on abuse redress (Conor Ryan, Irish Examiner)
(Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland)
YOU decide (if you live in the Midlands North West constituency).
Pro-Life Senator Rónán Mullen writes:
As you know, I am encouraging people to vote ‘NO’ to the abolition the Seanad. It is not the political reform we need and it would do more harm than good to our democratic system. If you haven’t voted yet today, please register your opposition to what the Government is doing.
I’d also like to mention that, in any event, I intend to be an independent candidate in the European Elections next year for the constituency of Midlands North West. I have been reluctant to declare this during the present campaign lest it be wrongly portrayed as undermining my arguments for retaining the Seanad. It has been my intention for some time to run for the European Parliament. I’d like you to know that this applies regardless of tomorrow’s result.
The make-up of the Euro-constituency will be: the Connacht-Ulster counties plus Longford, Westmeath, Laois, Offaly, Meath, Louth and Kildare.
I would be very grateful for your support in that campaign and for your involvement in whatever way you see fit.
Thanks A
Senator Ronan Mullen is an anagram of A Meaner Nun, Stroll On.
— Bernie Linnane (@Berlinnaeus) April 29, 2013
Bernie’s on a roll.
Unless YOU can do better?
Pic: (ronanmullen.net)
Earlier: That Which We Call A Rose
This just in.
From a rarely sober normally reliable source in Leinster House:
I am hearing Ronan Mullen has set up a new ‘religious-based’ party with Lorcan Price, a former secretarial assistant from Leinster house, now a junior counsel.
Anyone?
On our Croagh Patrick climb this Summer. Lord David Alton, Senator Ronan Mullen & Yours Truly ;-> yfrog.com/kj82usisj
— Declan Ganley (@declanganley) December 7, 2012
They wish they knew how to quit each other.
Bonus rainbow (not Photoshopped).
Fintan O’Toole (middle) standing in for Vincent Browne on TV3’s Tonight with Vincent Browne last night with a panel including United Left Alliance TD Clare Daly; Caroline Simons legal advisor to the pro-life campaign (above); Independent Senator Ronan Mullen (top) and Sinead Ahern, spokesperson for Choice Ireland.
It got pretty dark.
Fintan O’Toole: “Ronan Mullen, if we start with that European Court for Human Rights’ ruling last year which is why the Government is going to have to deal with this situation one way or the other. It was a very narrow ruling and actually very precise. And what it found was, in the case of one woman, she had cancer, she inadvertently became pregnant, she was having treatment. And no-one in Ireland could tell her, with any kind of clarity, what the legal situation was as to whether or not she could have an abortion to save her life. Now that was the unanimous ruling. As a matter of fact, of the European court. I mean isn’t that, in itself, just an inexcusable barbarity in a 21st century democracy?”
Senator Ronan Mullen: “No, I don’t see it the way you’ve just presented it at all. And in fact right from the beginning there, there in the break even before the programme, you said that the court had ruled that we must now legislate. Even that’s inaccurate actually Fintan. We’ve got..One of the difficulties about this issue I think is that some people in the media have tended to see in this issue what they’ve wanted to see and they’ve used it on occasions to justify maybe their own prejudices about the state of Ireland’s abortion laws. Some of the facts around the C case are not clear. For example whether the person in question even saw an oncologist in Ireland, OK? So we need to be very clear.”
O’Toole: “What’s absolutely clear. Let’s just quote from it then. You’re saying I’m being inaccurate about this So let’s just quote…”
Mullen: “Well I haven’t gone that far.”
O’Toole: “What it says is, it says that ‘she couldn’t even get from her own doctor, right, clarity about whether or not he could preform a procedure’ and it said that ‘there was a serious risk of a criminal conviction and imprisonment if an initial doctor’s opinion that abortion was an option was carried out’. Now surely.”
Mullen: “The..the..no…”
O’Toole: “That’s a matter of fact. It’s also a matter of fact that what the court found was that the Government couldn’t tell the court. Now this is the court’s own judgement. It said it couldn’t tell the court what lawful abortions are currently carried out in Ireland. And it said that there was no explanation why the existing constitutional right to an abortion – in the case where the mother’s life is threatened – had not been implemented to date right? So those are the facts.”
Mullen: “No you have presented correct information there. Now I wasn’t necessarily just..I certainly wasn’t having a go at you to be honest with you Fintan. I’m trying to illustrate that sometimes these issues are different from what they’re made out to be. What was actually found and it was actually misrepresented in the Irish Times – on the front page article today – was not that Ireland must legislate to give effect to the 1992 Supreme Court decision. What was actually found was that there was a breach of the privacy rights of the third applicant in this case because the absence of an effective legislative or regulatory mechanism that would allow the person to have their case determined to see whether they met the, the Irish current constitutional position. Now what that means is and a very significant issue when the expert group comes back to report will be to what extent they have looked at…”
O’Toole: “This is the expert group that the Government have set up to advise on how to proceed.”
Mullen: “Exactly. And very interesting to what extent have they understood and have they examined what international law we are dealing with. We are not dealing with, for example, a ruling by the Irish Supreme Court. We have a finding that a person’s European convention rights were not upheld and what we now have, we enter into now is the diplomatic and political process where Ireland engages with the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe to come up with the solution. Now just to give you an example. In the British Hearst case is an example of a case where the European Court of Human Rights found against Britain because of their general prohibition of prisoners in custody from being able to vote. Britain is consistently critiqued and refused to implement that decision. And not only that but the European Court of Human Rights has to some extent even taken on Britain’s argument. Because in a very recent decision involving Italy they have moved towards the right of the state to determine the matter. So people need to be very clear on this because there has been a tendancy in some quarters to somehow project this that ‘Ireland now has no choice but to bring in abortion’. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ireland now must give clarity and it should give clarity and that will involve, rightly in my view, giving clarity to anybody who might have any medical condition. Because one thing we can also be sure of is that Irish women, currently, get top-notch medical care in pregnancy. We are, under the 2010 UN figures, joint-first in the world in terms of low maternal mortality. Let’s not lose sight of that.”
O’Toole: “There were 17 judges I think on the European Court of Human Rights. They gave a very narrow judgement which was not a pro-choice judgement at all. It actually threw out a lot of the arguments that were being made. It was a very narrow judgement. And what it says was that there’s a real human being in the middle of this situation who was placed in the most appalling situation by the Irish State.”
Caroline Simons: “May I address you?”
O’Toole: “Let me just put the question out. If you would address it because what’s the situation of that woman? And of other women…
Talk over each other.
O’Toole: “Hold on, hold on a minute now. What’s the situation of that woman and other women like her who are, right now, in situations where they cannot be told by their own doctors what kind of medical procedure they can have to save their lives. This is one of the very few places in the world where that…”
Mullen: “They can be told. They can be told. I mean you’re misrepresenting…”
Simons: “I’m sorry. May I…”
Talk over each other.
Simons: “The question was asked of me and I’d like to answer it.”
O’Toole: “Do you want me to read that out again? That’s what the court found.”
Mullen: “No, no. A lot of the facts. A lot of the facts.”
Talk over each other.
Simons: “The court in fact looked at the situation and the decision that was actually made was there was a recognition of the fact that the Supreme Court had given a right to abortion in 1992 in circumstances where they said the mother’s life is at risk including by her own threat of suicide. And the court observed there was nothing in place to enable a woman to know when she fell within those parameters. And what they said is that there should be clarity on the issue. There is no, there is no compulsion on that judgement for us to legislate for abortion. And the thing Fintan that you are ignoring persistently, and persistently in your article where you talk about “a lunatic fringe that would deny life-saving medical treatment to a pregnant woman if it results in the termination of the pregnancy”. I know of no such lunatic group in this country and I’d like you to name one.”
O’Toole: “I specifically said that the overwhelming majority of anti-abortion activists do not fall into that category so.”
Simons: “I accept that.”
O’Toole: “So don’t be misquoting that.”
Simons: “You said there’s a “lunatic fringe”. There’s no such.”
O’Toole: “There is a lunatic fringe.”
[Later]
Mullen: Think of the Special Olympics a few years ago, Fintan. And how we celebrated the way we cherish vulnerable people. The people who we were rightly celebrating at that Special Olympics event are people who simply aren’t born anymore to any significant degree in the western world. There is a big values question at the heart of this debate. Who do we cherish? Do we include everybody in the human community. But, in doing so, you never. You must never lost sight either of the welfare of women or of the welfare of their unborn child.”
Watch here
Previously: The Nasty TD…The Smirking Senator
Following the weekend controversy over Senator Ronan Mullen’s alleged behaviour during and after a meeting with women who had their pregnancies terminated (following diagnoses of abnormalities “incompatible with life”), James Burke spoke with Jonathan Healy on today’s Lunchtime show on Newstalk.
James’ wife Amanda Mellet was 21 weeks pregnant when her baby was diagnosed with Edwards Syndrome. This is an abnormality caused by the presence of three, instead of two, copies of chromosome 18. it also causes congenital heart defects. A child with Edwards syndrome is likely to die after birth if not in the womb. James and Amanda travelled to Liverpool for a termination on December 2.
Jonathan Healy: “So let’s go to the Oireachtas last Wednesday. Yourself and a number of other couples went in to talk about your experiences before the Oireachtas committee. First of all, why did you do that. And second of all, what was the reaction of those inside that room?”
James: “Well, that was something that just kind of you know happened, really, you know? I mean we’ve been living our lives and trying to get on with this and..we were told that the Irish Times wanted to do a story that we, to meet with TDs. Now we knew this Bill was being debated on the Wednesday evening, that Clare Daly, and a few Independent TDs, had brought forward. We knew about that. So it was actually a..sorry..can I just take a sec…[starts coughing] I just got choked up there a little bit.
Jonathan: “That’s all right. So pick up from where you knew you were going in there, you knew Clare Daly’s Bill was being debated.”
James: “Yeah. So we didn’t realise it was going to be such a big story on Tuesday, we didn’t know it was going to be on the front page. So we were going along, just to tell our stories. Because we feel there are people who may think that we should have carried through with the whole pregnancy and given birth to Aoife in a natural way and so forth. We have spoken to lots of families who when they hear our story, they go ‘Oh, yeah you’ve done the right thing’ even though they wouldn’t be pro-choice so much themselves, you know? So we wanted to get our word across to the TDs and Senators and it was in an AV room. I don’t think many people would be familiar with it. It’s in a classroom kind of lecture hall setting. So we were sitting at the front on a desk and then there was, you know, seats in front of us where everybody was coming in to hear the story. So we, it was chaired by the [National] Women’s Council of Ireland, introduced it, and then we pretty much all told our stories.”
Jonathan: “We know from the Late Late Show on Friday night that the women who were there said the meeting was compassionate but one member of the Oireachtas had been extremely unpleasant. What can you, what can you tell us about that?”
James: “It’s complicated and I don’t want this to take away from the overall story of what we’ve gone through. But, well, the person in question I guess had spoken of a baby that he had known, it all sounded very vague, that survived after being diagnosed with Anecaphaly. And, it’s just medically that’s impossible. So it kind of, it upset us there. We keep having to come across this argument that ‘Oh there are cases that babies with Edwards Syndrome or Patau Syndrome or Anencphaly can survive’. And that’s medically impossible as far as we can tell. So it kind of, it upset people. And we felt it wasn’t, we weren’t there to defend ourselves. We weren’t there to give our view points. We just wanted to tell our stories and let people make up their own minds. We weren’t trying to push any agenda.”
Jonathan: “Are you willing to say who that member of the Oireachtas is, at this point?”
James: “Well I didn’t know at the time and actually one of the ladies on the Late Late Show actually thought it was a TD but it turns out it’s a Senator. And so…”
Jonathan: “Do you want to give his name? Are you…”
James: “I think it was Ronan Mullen was his name.”
Jonathan: “And what did he say? Did he interact with you personally at the end of all of this?”
James: “Yes. Well it’s…we all gave our stories and then…You see you’re at the front, you’re beside the door where everybody comes in and out when we’re sitting down at the desk at the front of the room. And there’s always people passing by and at the end of it a lot of people were in the room. There were Senators and TDs talking to us and asking us different stories so there were a lot of people coming up to us. And he was on his way out and he just kind of stopped and he said ‘well done for speaking’ or something. And then he said something like ‘well played’. And I kind of got this feeling he was, I got this feeling he was trying to make a debate out of it. And we weren’t trying to do that.”
Jonathan: “What did he mean by ‘well played’? That’s an unusual thing to say.”
James: “I don’t know. I really don’t know what he meant but we, we were..as I said, you know, I just thought he was trying to make a debate out of it. And we weren’t emotionally ready for that. Nor did we want that. So I just really, I don’t know what he meant really. I just don’t. So then I just, I shook his hand and I said ‘thanks for coming down’ and then he, he kinda said to me, as he was shaking my hand, ‘But you have a bigger agenda James, don’t you?’. And I just was shocked for a minute and Amanda heard this and she was beside me and I said ‘what?’ And he said ‘You’ve a bigger agenda, don’t you?’ And that’s when I said ‘look I don’t want to talk about this. You know? This is not the time or place. Would you mind just leaving?’ And he was on his way out anyway and he left and that’s all it was.”
[Later]
Jonathan Healy: “Senator Mullen has gotten in contact with us. He is busy this afternoon [and] not in a position to come on the programme but he said he would be happy to talk to us tomorrow. Here is some of that statement. He goes on about how he actually ended up going late into that meeting, which is common enough. He said, not long after he arrived, a man at the top table, who was clearly from one of the families involved, invited anyone present to explain why abortion shouldn’t be allowed in that situation. After a moment of silence, Ronan Mullen said he tentatively offered his hand, he sympathised with the families, he offered his perspective and why he felt abortion was not the best response. At one point the same man, now we don’t whether this is Mr Burke who we were talking to earlier on, cause he doesn’t identify [who it was] in this statement. But at one point the same man, Ronan Mullen said, accused me of smirking while I was speaking. I was taken aback by this. It was absolutely untrue. I felt that it was a comment designed to portray me unsympathetically. I did however feel uncomfortable at that point with the atmosphere that had been generated in the room and I replied that I was probably grimacing. I invited the families present to be in touch with us individually for friendly and respectful dialogue, independently of their involvement with the Irish Family Planning Association and the National Women’s Council. He said he had concerns about the policies of both those organisations.”
Meanwhile: Mullen Insists Abortion Conversation ‘Entirely Courteous On My Side (Breaking News)’
Three women who had pregnancies in which their babies were diagnosed with abnormalities “incompatible with life”, with each “travelling” to have those pregnancies terminated, appeared on last night’s Late Late show.
Their story was featured on the front page of the Irish Times during the week.
The women, top from left: Ruth Bowie, Arlette Lyons and Jenny McDonald told Ryan Tubridy about a meeting they had with 25 TDs and senators at Leinster House on Wednesday to explain their predicament. It was in their own words a tearful and emotional encounter.
Jenny McDonald: “The TDs have been sitting on this for 20 years. That’s what makes me angry. This cannot happen to our children.”
Ryan Tubridy: “Did you say that to the TDs this week?”
McDonald: “Yes.”
Ruth Bowie: “We cried in front of them. We pleaded with them”
Tubridy: “What did you say to them?”
Bowie: “That you have to change this. This is a human rights issue. You cannot do this to us. You cannot turn your back on us. Force us out of our country, away from our families, and treat us like this. It’s barbaric and cruel.”
Tubridy: “Did you feel they were listening?”
Arlette Lyons: “Some of them did. Some of them were lovely and compassionate. We did have one particular TD who was extremely nasty to us.”
Tubridy: “Sorry say that again?”
Lyons: “We had one TD who wasn’t very pleasant.”
Tubridy: “Why not?”
Lyons: “He just wasn’t very pleasant to us but…that’s fine.”
Tubridy: “He just didn’t agree with what you were saying obviously. Again, as there are people now watching who despite everything won’t be happy with what they hear…”
This follows a comment on the Magic Mum forum on Thursday from a woman who said she had been at the meeting:
“I had one TD smirking at us yesterday while we sold our souls on the heartbreak of what we went through he actually had a smile on his face while we were bawling giving them our stories. I have never wanted to smack someone so hard in the face like I wanted to him yesterday. This nasty little man was Ronan Mullen. Please never ever ever vote for him.”
[Ronan Mullen is, in fact, a senator for the NUI Seanad constituency]
She added:
“He told me I should [have] carried my baby until the end because Ireland has the best palliative care in the world, he also said that he was sponsoring [a] child in Africa that had one of the conditions that the other girl Ruth’s baby had. Then he asked one of us at the end of our session, on the quiet, he said “What is your real agenda here?”. This was to a girl who lost her daughter Aoife at 22 weeks.”
Watch in full here.
Update:
Mullen told TheJournal.ie today that he would be “horrified at any suggestion that I was nasty to anyone at that meeting, especially the women who came to tell their stories”.
I would say there was no single politician in that room who did not feel sympathy for those women, regardless of their opinion on abortion. They were treated with respect and sensitivity at all times.”
Ronan Mullen Horrified At ‘Nasty’ Suggestions Over Abortion Debate (Sinead O’Carroll, Journal.ie)
Meanwhile:
@CoraSherlock @kencurtin @MagicMumCom it is not a claim it was indeed Ronan Mullen
— TFMR (@MTFMRAII) April 21, 2012
fyi re senetor ronan mullen his words were “you have a bigger agenda dont you” nasty comment to someone who had just lost their child END OF
— TFMR (@MTFMRAII) April 21, 2012