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Updated 1.20pm
EDUCATION MINISTER JAN O’Sullivan has said she would like to see a referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment held in the future, but said it can’t happen under the current government.
O’Sullivan, a Labour TD, said this morning that she was concerned about the issue of fatal foetal abnormalities and said the emergence of the case of a woman who gave birth by caesarean after being refused an abortion was a “very, very difficult case”.
“I would like to see it in the future but it won’t happen in the lifetime of the current government,” O’Sullivan told RTÉ of the possibility of another referendum.
Earlier, junior justice minister Aodhán Ó Riordáin told the Irish Independent that the next government must be “brave enough” to call another abortion referendum. He said that the Constitutional Convention should be recalled to consider the matter.
The Labour TD has previously told this website that he does not believe the current coalition has the mandate to go beyond the legislation it introduced last year.
The case that has emerged over the weekend is one of the first under the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act which came into force last year and has drawn criticism both from pro-choice and pro-life campaigners.
The Pro Life Campaign said that the development highlighted the “horror and deep seated flaws” in the government’s legislation passed amid much controversy last year. Pro choice groups believe the law is “unsafe”.
Four Labour groups within the party have called for the repeal of the 8th Amendment including Labour Women, Labour Youth, Labour Equality and Labour Intercultural.
They believe that the case highlights the need to repeal Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution which protects the right to life of the unborn “with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother”.
Sinead Ahern, the chair of Labour Women, said the case this case demonstrates that “those carrying the pregnancies are essentially treated as vessels devoid of independent human rights as was recently highlighted by the UN Human Rights Committee”.
“The only way these human rights violations can be stopped is by repealing the 8th amendment,” she said.
The amendment was made via a referendum in 1983 following pressure from pro-life groups. It was intended to completely outlaw abortion in Ireland. However the 1992 X Case resulted in the Supreme Court interpreting the law as giving a woman the right to an abortion in circumstances where her life is at risk, including from suicide.
Repealing the amendment would require another referendum.
The chair of Labour Youth, Ciaran Garrett, said it appeared from the latest case that “at no point” were the rights of the woman, who is not an Irish national, respected.
“This young woman, who it seems was in an incredibly vulnerable state, appears to have been forced by our courts and by the HSE to undergo numerous invasive medical procedures against her will,” he said.
The chair of Labour Intercultural, Karen Mc Cormack, said the woman in question would “not have been subjected to this barbaric treatment” had she gone abroad for a termination.
First published 12.23pm
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how much did they pay for the domain i wonder?
http://www.businessandleadership.com/marketing/item/37695-tourism-ireland-buys-irelan
says 490k for the domain name, *yikes*
half a million wow o_O
Bargain, names like that can easily go for over a million
Bargain is right . It’s an investment rather than an expense . Has huge resale value . Irish Times sold cheap IMO .
The could have bought Ireland for 490K never mind the domain name
Barry, the point is really simple. URL Ireland .com.is in my computers memory. When I click on it I get the IT. I.t is not a case of it being “once used” ,it is currently being used. A bit of accuracy is neded here. And anyway, I suppose I have raised something’s hat does bot relate tout being bought by Tourism Ireland.
**Buys pierce a pint
Smithwicks please
Will make little difference – the discover ireland website is a mess.
Why don’t you offer to revamp it for them?
The article says the website is being overhauled.
That tourism Ireland website has been a joke for years despite them having spent millions of tax payers money on it .
It looks like and has been designed by civil servents with massive interference by local gombeen politicians with an ear to whatever minister is in charge of tourism at the time .
This whole gathering thing is another load of bull heavily advertised at home but very little abroad
But Jerry the point of it is also that Irish people organise events for gathering at and invite friends and family abroad home for it so a lot of advertising needs to be done in Ireland for it as well!!
My redesign would be a website with 1 page – one pic and the tagline ‘discover ireland’ – nothing else.
Maybe the photo changes once a week.
No twitter page. No facebook page.
And no listings of cabbage festivals in ballygoboredom.
I’d rather the domain is used for Irish Tourism then the total joke that the Irish Times have made of the portal sites they’ve setup on the domain since 1996. Irish Times never made a decent job of it…awful shame they couldn’t do a decent job considering all the money they put into it.
yep.
A free ireland.com email address makes a good free promo though – hope they keep that.
They will NOT keep the ireland.com e-mail service, which is a pity. It will be closed down quite rapidly with users having less than a month to sort their move! http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1015/breaking44.html
Will current users out Ireland.com email be guaranteed free email?
Great coup for the Irish Times. Too bad they didn’t sell out 6 years ago. they could have had a million I reckon.
Im a business and personal user of Ireland.com email addresses. Its a lot of work to now change over to a new email system. No doubt I will loose emails and probably business as a result. I paid the Irish Times for the service for a number of years. Its a major nuisance for me. I believe The Irish Times should be paying compensation to owners who paid and supported them over the years, and are now faced with hours of work.
Will there be an acknowledgment and forwarding facility for emails sent to my Ireland.com email addresses after 7 December ?
No there will not be any forward facility after 7th of December. If someone sends you email to yours @ireland.com after that day, then email will be bounced back to the sender like your email never existed.
It’s a disgrace!
I fully agree that although service was recently free my business depended on the .ireland address and would have been prepared to re-subscribe. I believe a contract of sorts has been broken
?490000, Dear God
So Rory, what you’re saying is, the deal is fiasco because you have Ireland.com bookmarked?
I got an Ireland.com email account which I don’t use because if I send an email from it it could take over a day for it to arrive which is a pity because Ireland.com sounds great.
Well, I remember the tiger years, (one of) the tourist chief(s) mocking something like: “Ireland too expensive tourist destination? We still get enough people here – and if they canot pay we don’t relly want to keep them”
Personally, I think this is disgraceful and would urge anyone affected by this to contact them directly at customerservice@digitalworx.ie.
Below is a copy of the email I have sent to them:
I am emailing to register my disgust at your decision to sell the ireland.com domain to Tourism Ireland and the impact this will have on your customers.
As a regular user of the service for over 10 years, this development will affect me in a number of ways- having used the domain name as my main business email account, the address was extremely beneficial as it was easy to remember and is my main point of contact for friends, colleagues and customers. Not only will I now have to go through the tortuous process of having to inform everyone of a change of email address, but I will also need to get all my corporate literature, business cards, brochures, etc. revised, which will be a very expensive exercise and a cost I could do without in the current economic climate.
I have had a look at the FAQs page you have created for service users to detail how to deal with this transition and the attitude exhibited in same is contemptuous to say the least- your assertion that when initially signing up for the service, users implicitly acknowledged the terms and conditions and ownership of the ‘free service’ resided with ireland.com- this ignores the fact that we have been paying for this ‘premium service’ for the past number of years…
I would strongly urge you to reconsider how you are treating users of this service and how you propose to manage the transition- while your grubby little deal with Tourism Ireland, which provides you with an exit from the business which you have obviously long sought to do as demonstrated by the minimalist approach used in relation to customer service and technical maintenance of the service in recent years, probably cannot be reversed at this stage, how you treat customers having to cope with this changeover can be easily improved. You state that, after the 7th December 2012, “all data will be removed and destroyed”, and that users will have to export all of their emails to a new account- surely in this day of ‘cloud computing’ and easy remote access etc., it would not be too much to ask that the data each user has be exported to a temporary holding site while they make new arrangements. More importantly, and to lessen the burden you are imposing on customers of the service, it should not be too much to expect that a mail forwarding service be provided so that customers can have emails sent to their existing ireland.com address automatically forwarded to their new address? In my opinion, such a facility should be a basic minimum service, provided on an indefinite basis, for long-standing customers of ireland.com.
Well said. I have also complained to John O’Shea Head of on-line; joshea@irishtimes.com who was responsible in the IT for recommending this sale. I suggest that upset customers make it known to him as well……
I complained too but not in such an eloquent way. Unfortunately I feel it wont do any good. Business before loyal customers is the rule right? I too have been using this email address for years. I am currently looking for a job and as such have sent out CVs, business cards and registered with employment agencies, all with this email address. It will take more then the mere 7 weeks allowed for me to tie up loose ends. As I said in my complaint email, it’s a farce and as per usual it’s the service user that bears the upheaval. Does anyone have suggestion for a good email provider, where you may not have to have a 3 digit number after your name?
Quite ironic seeing as the T&C’s of the service, forbid it’s use for business. Foot, shot.
How dare they disconnect 15000 email users in 3 weeks time. Apart from the obvious personal disruption they are causing chaos for many Irish businesses who use @ireland.com addresses to market themselves. It’s disgraceful
Sadly they’re discontinuing the @ireland.com emails addresses, which is a shame.
Sad for people, if people want a e-mail address that doesn’t change then they are better off paying a few euro and getting a domain name that they can forward to the e-mail provider of their choice.
I’ve been doing this for years and although I’ve changed e-mail providers numerous times I’ve kept the same e-mail address since 1998.
They’d have been better off putting the 490,000 towards making the country less of a rip off for people to visit if they wanted to boost numbers. DiscoverIreland.com is already the second link on Google; Ireland.com is third. Is either really going knock the Ireland wiki page off number one spot? Bit of a waste of half a million.
I miss my pat@ireland.com email address
Wonder if the same person who sold this was the one who decided to pay 50 million for myhome.ie? Might go someway to restoring their rep hopefully. Ireland.com where it should be now I think.
and they can Feck off if they think they can take my email address, shower of useless donkeys
They ARE taking it, you have no choice in the matter
It does make a lot more sense for Ireland.com to be the tourism site, but what’s with the price? Excessive isn’t a strong enough word..
Yes it would help but they wouldn’t want to do like dublin airport big pictures and adds for the north of Ireland what’s the story with that
Sorry 490k for a domain name? Why not ireland.xx anything at all considering most people are directed from google or other sights. A very poor idea to pay for that
Because this is how domain names business works, com is always biggest value. http://www.ireland.ie would be of quite big value too, bit that already exists – discover Ireland. Its not bad actually, but could be so much better and community driven. Thousands of people drop idea of going to some places if they cannot find easy and encouraging website for it, that is a fact.
Forme your story is lacking one important piece of information. What is the new web address of the Irish Times going to be. You have shown the difference between a journal and an aggregator.
Yes, finding out the main Irish Times site URL is a difficult one alright Rory…
The Irish times will use its current web address – read the first line of the article at least. Then check irishtimes.com
The IT has been using http://www.irishtimes.com for some time now.
Wrong. URL Ireland.com is still in use by IT. Irish times.com s in use for it’s crossword editor. Get your facts right before mouthing off.
Rory, the Irish Times has always been reachable via http://www.irishtimes.com even when they did use Ireland.com as a portal site…they’ve not really used it as a portal site in years though because it never properly worked out for them.
Hmm is it that hard?!
Actually Rory you are the one who needs to check your facts. The Irish Times have been officially using the irishtimes.com web address for years now ever since ireland.com site became a general portal site.
DUBLIN.IE offer free email
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