Lucinda Creighton TD, who resigned from her role as Minister
of European Affairs and from the Fine Gael party whip, rather than vote in
favour of the Government abortion legislation, was interviewed on Spirit Radio
by Ronan Johnston, during his programme Rojo in the morning, on October 31st.
During the interview Ms Creighton said;
“The reality was also that you had a junior coalition partner in the doldrums in terms of opinion polls, under pressure because of the very difficult economic decisions we had taken as a government. And they needed something. And I think it’s pretty horrific to think that a trade-off could be made between budget cuts and the introduction of abortion, but that’s actually what happened, let’s be frank about it.So the trade-off was to keep the Labour Party happy that people in Fine Gael who were deeply uncomfortable with the idea of legalising abortion or legislating for a more liberal abortion regime in Ireland would just have to, as somebody said in the corridors of Leinster House, they’d just have to “suck it up”. And, you know, the Labour Party backbenchers were feeling pain on the economy so therefore Fine Gael backbenchers would just have to suck it up on the issue of abortion. And that’s basically what happened.”
The full interview is available on podcast on this link
