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Ireland’s minority Government today approved the text of the Health Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Bill; same being the legislation that will give effect to the result of the Referendum on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution which was held earlier this year. This bill is expected to be introduced and debated by all representatives in our Irish Parliment next week.
The present Minister for Health Mr Simon Harris has described today as a very important one for the women of Ireland, with the Government now acting on the instruction of the Irish people. This new legislation that will go before the Dáil next week will provide for access to abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy.
Same new legislation will also provide for access to terminations in a case of where a mother’s life or health is at risk and where there is a diagnosis of a potentially fatal foetal abnormality. There will be a pause of just a 3 day period between the first meeting between patient and doctor and any future termination. Terminations are expected to be paid for at the taxpayers expense and free of charge to the patient.
It is expected that the Government is aiming to have this termination service in place and available on a national basis by the beginning of next year; following meetings with medical representative groups taking place over the coming weeks, latter who will argue on the future of such services and how will operate. There will also be a separate legislation enacted to introduce safe access zones to prevent women from being intimidated or harassed in the course of seeking such services.
 An abortion flyer in South Africa. – Courtesy wikipedia.org However this present minority government have forgotten one small fact, namely Article 6 of our present Irish Constitution.
Article 6 of the Irish Constitution currently and unchanged to date, states: “All powers of Government, legislative, executive and judicial, derive under God from the people.” Thus this same unchanged as yet, Article 6 of the Irish Constitution currently debars the Dáil from passing laws authorising abortion, i.e., the killing of the unborn. Article 6 seem to have been somewhat overlooked in the rush by certain individuals to break the 5th commandment “Thou shalt not kill.”
The law of God which clearly states that “Thou shall not kill” , thus must surely prevail over Minister Simon Harris’s proposed abortion law. The present Government is therefore very mistaken in their thinking that the May 25th Referendum result, now grants them the right to legislate for abortion as proposed in Minister Harris’s general scheme of a Bill to Regulate Termination of Pregnancy.
Perhaps I am not making myself fully clear to all readers; so do allow me to further simplify my statement.
The people may be the supreme legislators in any Referendum to change the Constitution, but they, as well as our political leaders e.g. TD’s and Senators, are limited by what the Irish Constitution already states, regarding the source of parliamentary power. They cannot contradict or ignore what is said in the Irish Constitution’s preamble or introduction, which begins by stating that the Constitution is enacted “In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority …” . Nor can they ignore what is said in Article 6 which states that “All powers of Government, legislative, executive and judicial, derive under God from the people.” (Scroll, if you will, down to Article 6.)
The words “under God” are significant. If God has said “Thou shalt not kill”, Simon Harris’s proposed law, which says that you may kill unborn babies, is therefore unconstitutional and beyond his or the Oireachtas’s legislative powers. Though many may be reluctant to accept it, the fact is that according to Article 6 of the Irish Constitution, the Oireachtas is not supreme, and the people who gave TDs and Senators their legislative powers are not supreme either. Only God is supreme, and he has given the Oireachtas no authority whatsoever to override the fifth commandment; “Thou shalt not kill”.
We as a nation may have recently paganised our laws by some 66.4% on the 25th of May last, by trying to delete the human right to life of the unborn, which the 8th Amendment previously acknowledged and protected, but until the people paganise our laws even more fully, by deleting the “Most Holy Trinity”, from the first sentence of the Irish Constitution’s introduction, and by deleting “God”, from Article 6; the Government and Oireachtas have absolutely no constitutional power, whatsoever, to legalise the killing of even one unborn baby by abortion.
“But, isn’t our Parliament Supreme”, I hear you all shout? The answer is simply “No”.
At one time, kings claimed a divine right to make whatever laws they wished. Nowadays democratic theory and most constitutions would say that the power to make laws comes to the legislature from the people. “Democracy” after all is the Greek word for “people power”. But are there limits to the powers the people may grant to their Parliament to make laws? Our minority Government seems to believe in the theory of absolute parliamentary supremacy, so that there is no higher authority to limit their authority to make any laws they wish.
Over a century ago, the ethician (a person who specializes in or writes on ethics or who is devoted to ethical principles), Sir Leslie Stephen, famously showed the absurdity of the theory of absolute parliamentary supremacy, explaining that; “If a legislature decided that all blue-eyed babies should be murdered, the preservation of blue-eyed babies would be illegal; … but legislators must go mad before they could pass such a law, and subjects be idiotic before they could submit to it.” [1] Now, you our readers, please substitute “unborn” for “blue-eyed” and Sir Leslie Stephen’s argument will still very much apply.
[1]Leslie Stephen, The Science of Ethics, (1882), p.145. In logic this argument is described as ‘reductio ad absurdum’, (Latin for “argument to absurdity”) or the appeal to extremes, is a form of argument that attempts either to disprove a statement by showing it inevitably leads to a ridiculous, absurd, or impractical conclusion, hence your argumentation is flawed. The surprise of many at the proposal to allow unrestricted abortion in the first 12 weeks, and their regarding of this as “going too far”, would be in line with this instinctive judgement of the absurdness of our Government’s proposed legislation.
Yet another problem with the theory of absolute parliamentary supremacy surfaced during the trials of the Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg during the years 1945-6. The Nazis claimed that what they did only what was authorised by German law, and in accordance with the theory of absolute parliamentary supremacy, this was a perfect defence. The Nuremberg courts, in deference to the Russian judges, who might be atheists, could not regard the Nazi atrocities as crimes against God, so they adopted the term “crimes against humanity” to justify finding the Nazis guilty.
Differently from many other constitutions, the Irish Constitution unashamedly admits that there is a God from whom all authority is derived, and whose laws are superior to human laws. Article 41.1.1º admits that there are “inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent to and superior to all positive law.” The words “under God” were deliberately added in Article 6 to ensure that the Irish constitution would not be guilty of the absurdity to which the theory of absolute parliamentary supremacy leads. The Government and the Oireachtas do not have omnipotent power and influence, but are subject to the law of God.
The awkward fact for atheists, agnostics, the lapsed, and those in our Dáil, latter who haven’t bothered to read the Irish Constitution, is that those who did write it, and the majority who enacted it, back in 1937, for the most part actually believed in God and gave the Dáil no power to enact laws which are contrary to the law of God. When God said “Thou shalt not kill”, the consequence of Article 6 is that no Teachta Dála, no Seanadóir, no Judge, no Doctor and no Committee of Experts shall kill or authorise the killing of an innocent unborn child.
So, repealing the 8th Amendment has done only 66.4% of the project to introduce abortion to Ireland, and to complete the job of paganising our Irish Constitution; abortion advocates would need to take the words “under God” out of Article 6, and similarly delete the “Most Holy Trinity” and “our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ” from the Preamble. Until then, God remains in the Irish Constitution as a constitutional defence of an unborn child’s right to life, and Minister Simon Harris’s laws authorising abortion of the unborn are, I believe, totally unconstitutional.
Our present Government delayed the Referendum until after the Supreme Court had decided a case in which a Nigerian national had claimed a right not to be deported from Ireland, where he was an illegal immigrant, because of the rights of his unborn child. Judge Humphreys, in the High Court, agreed that there were constitutional rights of the unborn, in addition to the right contained in the 8th Amendment. The State appealed this to the Supreme Court, and the Government awaited the decision of the Supreme Court, before promoting the Referendum to repeal the Eighth. The Supreme Court obliged by overturning the High Court judgement, thereby, in the Government’s view, clearing the way for their intended abortion legislation.
But this is not so, and the way was not cleared, because the High Court decision, and the Supreme Court’s appeal decision, did not concern the constitutional rights of the unborn, if any, which were not dealt with in the Nigerian deportation case.
To sum up, Article 6 of the Irish Constitution still remains a major obstacle to proposed abortion legislation. In effect the Citizens’ Assembly, the Dáil Committee which implemented its findings, and Minister Simon Harris, both have been “firing blanks”, and while the latter blanks may contain gunpowder, projectiles have undoubtedly been found absent since 1937; by the Preamble and Article 6, both contained within our Irish Constitution.
Our RC Church leaders i.e. Bishops have remained silent in drawing attention to the Code of Canon Law, and Canon 1398 to be precise. Those involved in introducing abortion, [Latter word abortion which means the killing of the unborn any time from conception onwards], under the Code of Canon Law, are now automatically excommunicated from the church.
Canon 1398 States clearly; A person who actually procures an abortion, incurs a ‘latae sententiae’ excommunication. [‘latae sententiae’ means a penalty automatically incurred on the committing of such an offence, without the need for the intervention of any Judge or Superior to impose it.]
Finally our present minority Government, supported by Independents, have no money to provide houses for the homeless; no money to provide beds for those lying on trolleys; no money for painful degenerative spinal issues in children; no money for new and necessary pharmaceutical drugs; no money for mental health issues etc. etc. etc., the list is endless. But the irony of it all must be that we do have taxpayer funding for the provision of free abortions, and despite our decision to introduce said abortion, we will provide funding to investigate the scandal that is 796 dead babies found in a septic tank in Tuam Co. Galway, yet one other scandal that can be solely attributed to the lack of government supervision between 1925 and 1961; same being abortion yet again by another name.
 Deputy Michael Lowry TD. Today Deputy Michael Lowry TD, will welcome Minister Pat Breen (Fine Gael Minister of State for Trade, Employment, Business, EU Digital Single Market and Data Protection, since June 2017), to Co. Tipperary, where it is confirmed the Minister will announce 42 new jobs for the county.
Minister Breen is currently Chairman of the Oireachtas Foreign Affairs and Trade Committee and is deputy leader of the Irish Delegation to the Council of Europe.
These roles are based across three companies, in both the North and South of the county; with 21 jobs being created in Mack Engineering, Nenagh; 15 jobs in Horizon Offsite, Cahir, and 6 jobs in Phil Purcell Engineering, Upperchurch, Thurles, Co. Tipperary.
In a statement Deputy Lowry has said; “I am delighted that these new jobs have been supported by our Local Enterprise Office in their effort to support local indigenous business. I would like to complement these family owned businesses on the enterprise and initiatives they have shown and the great efforts they make, to sustain and grow their businesses and to develop local employment.”
The Community Hall, which sits in the centre of the picturesque village of Two-Mile-Borris, near Thurles, Co. Tipperary, is being currently offered for sale.
The hall’s closure in recent times had caused many living within the local community, to pause regarding the issue of its closure, while they considering its immediate future.
However in recent weeks a ‘For Sale’ sign has materialised; displayed on its front portals, without, according to some very upset locals, any consultation with the local village population.
Same sale within this tight knit community has generated no little hidden anger, with many viewing this decision as ‘high handed’, according to some individuals with whom we spoke.
In 1995 the hall was placed in the care of the parish, before being later invested in the Roman Catholic Diocesan Trust. A committee had been formed to look after the day-to-day running of this local asset, however a recent lack of maintenance and supervision etc, brought about its temporary closure.
Known History Of Two-Mile-Borris Community Hall
The hall, we understand, originated back in the latter part of the 19th century; around the 1890’s, when the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), latter a co-operative movement became established in Ireland. A group of innovative farmers in the area came together to form the Two Mile Borris Agricultural Society; becoming shareholders.
The initial aim of this Society was to purchase seed; fertiliser, and farm machinery, hiring out the latter to aid the local farming community. Part of the building was also used as a dwelling house.
The first secretary of the Society was Mr Tom Fanning from the townsland of Skehana, Two-Mile-Borris. The Society eventually went out of existence after some years.
Up until 1960 the ‘Society’, as the building was known, was used as a storeroom. Then the Fanning Family, from Skehana granted the use of the premises, including the now vacant dwelling area, to the Legion of Mary. Renovations were undertake by Mr John McGuire, a local building contractor and by local voluntary labour, before the Legion of Mary began to use the hall as a meeting place; a venue for fund-raising and as a tea rooms.
In the 1970’s Two-Mile-Borris Festival Committee used the hall, carrying out further developments in subsequent years. This same Festival Committee also purchased the field beside the school, without financial assistance from any lending agency. Locals were adamant in their praise of these former, hard working, community members, latter who raised the finance for both of these aforementioned two projects.
[We learn that this former committee included names such as: Fr. Bobby Harkin C.C., Mr Richard Ryan, Mr Jimmy Moloughney, Mr Gerry Bowe, Ms Josie Fanning, Mr Thomas Cussen and Mr Sean Cussen, latter all clearly visible to the fore and at the helm of this organisation in the past.]
Interesting to note that some of the community then sought a ‘Vegas’ type hall at that time, but all were ruled out of order.
In 1989 the late Mr Harry Ryan, Galboola, Littleton, then Chairperson of Tipperary Co. Council, for the first time since the halls inception, held a meeting of the Council Authority here in his own native Two-Mile-Borris.
The first photograph shown on the slide-show hereunder was taken on January 1st, 2000. I had waited, well wrapped up against the frosty darkness, at the entrance to the Lady’s Well pedestrian pathway for the first rays of sunlight to break the eastern horizon. This, after all, was to be the dawning of the first day of a promising new millennium for Thurles; that interval of time consisting of one thousand years.
On that morning, the view before me reminded me of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;”
Here for anyone with even a modicum of imagination was a blank canvas presented by Mother Nature; being offered to develop a footpath attraction, which would entice safely for those who wished, for an hour or two, to avoid the noise; the glower of insipid tarmac and characterless cement, not to mention the stench of petrol and diesel exhaust emissions. Here was the perfect opportunity to scatter naturally occurring, wild, flower seeds; Meadowsweet, Oxeye Daisies, Montbretia, Lady’s Smock, Red Clovers, Poppies, etc, thus developing a retreat, nay a safe place, for sharing with our bees, butterflies, birds, moths and other precious Irish pollinators.
Here was an opportunity to update a protective railing; add a few more park-style benches along the riverbank, allowing the rambler to sit and view a wild flower spectacle, which in the words of poet W. Wordsworth; just like his daffodils, could later “flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude”.
Here in Tipperary politicians talk consistently about the need for better mental health supports. Humans are becoming less connected with nature, and in doing so are losing an essential health buffer. Yes, there exists strong mounting evidence that contact with nature has major and significant positive impacts on our mental health.
Our second picture was taken on July 29th 2018 last. Eighteen years on and the area has become further deteriorated, with only a few families daring to traverse the subsiding river bank, latter being consistently washed away each winter by torrential flooding.
Still, I suppose the Lady’s Well pedestrian pathway is not necessary as an everyday public walkway, unlike the pedestrian crossing at Cathedral Street, Thurles, which also further highlights the neglect by Templemore/ Thurles Municipal District Council management.
Readers will be aware that modern pedestrian signals on such crossings incorporate countdown timers into their design, that display the signal for pedestrians to cross using a green light.
Article 14 of the Road Traffic (Signs) Regulations, 1962
14. Either of the following types of mechanical signals may be used to control the crossing of a road by pedestrians at a place where traffic is controlled by traffic lights as prescribed in Article 13 of these Regulations:—
(a) a single lamp, which shall comply with the following conditions:—
(i) it shall face the pedestrians whose movements it is intended to control;
(ii) it shall show, when lit:—
(A) a green light through the full area of the lens or,
(B) a figure of a pedestrian in green on a black ground or,
(C) a message (such as the words ” Cross Now”) in white on a black ground, indicating that pedestrians may cross the road.
On February 1st 2018, we highlighted the fact that these pedestrian crossing lights were pointed in the wrong direction and do not “face the pedestrians whose movements it is intended to control“.
On July 16th 2018, we again highlighted the fact that pedestrian crossing lights remained pointed in the wrong direction.
While less than a dozen people will traverse the collapsing Lady’s Well pedestrian pathway in any one day; when our schools re-open at the end of August 2018; together with Mass goers, shoppers and secondary school pupils, the Cathedral Street, pedestrian controlled intersection will exceed some 1,500 crossings per day, all of whom will remain blind as to their right to cross.
From a vehicles point of view, Road traffic regulations state that “a pedestrian shall exercise care and take all reasonable precautions in order to avoid causing danger or inconvenience to traffic and other pedestrians”
To be fair Templemore/Thurles Municipal District Councillors are great for ‘Calling’ for things, especially on local radio; and more especially when health and safety issues are at stake, like hedge cutting etc. However Ratepayers and those paying Property Tax in Thurles should note that their subscriptions to both worthy causes are in danger of greatly increasing, with town Councillors continuing to ignore accidents just waiting to happen.
What with dangerous footpaths and giant potholes evident everywhere, no one is looking skyward, especially while in the vicinity of Slievenamon Road, Thurles, just outside Hugh Ryan’s Funeral Home. [Note: Careful gawking if you are driving please.]
For some weeks the guts of a public street light has been precariously dangling some 30ft above the pavement/road. With even a slight breeze there is a real danger that wires attached will break off, resulting in a pedestrians head being split open or a passing car being seriously damaged.
We have contacted Thurles Gardaí and Tipp County Council (Tel: 0761 06 5000). Despite giving the Council an accurate address, they were anxious that we supply them with a ‘Pole Number’. (God Help Us, but sackings are necessary.)
What Do You Think: Maybe before the Schools reopen?
Meanwhile, Thurles.Info, some months ago, highlighted the dangers at the the Cathedral Street pedestrian level crossing, but again no mention at Council meetings.
Quote from our report dated February 1st 2018,, “One hundred and twenty yards away, in August 2017 last, a high sided truck made the careless decision to adjust the automated pedestrian crossing lights outside of Thurles Cathedral. The bulbs on this crossing used to feed motorised traffic information have been changed on two occasions since, yet the pedestrian information lights have not been realigned, leaving pedestrians unable to view the crossings signals, causing unnecessary delay to motorists. This is a busy crossing used by over 600 school children twice daily to get to and from rural school buses, not to mention the several hundred church pilgrims and local shoppers out walking each day.”
Guys you have got to write these things down with the butt of your pencil, or better still, go on local radio and highlight the issue.
UPDATE: Thurles.Info is happy to relate that as and from 5.00pm this evening an ESB technician has rectified the danger to pedestrians on the Slievenamon Road, Thurles, just outside Hugh Ryan’s Funeral Home.
Begorra, (Latter an exclamation of surprise traditionally attributed to the Irish), I think I might run for the local Council at the next local elections. I might try to get on Tipp FM to-morrow and announce my candidacy, or sure maybe I could run for President and if unsuccessful, work my way down.
Of course the one year old problem of the Cathedral Street pedestrian crossing and the danger to school students hasn’t been fixed yet, but I am ‘Calling’ on Tipperary County Council to be proactive in fixing this also, especially while screwdrivers are still out of the toolbox.
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