Please allow Senator Mullen to conclude.

I am very happy-----

The Leader, who has listened to all of this, will respond wisely in a minute.

He will be well able to respond.

I would be very happy to have a debate on this issue at this point, given that we have had the clamour from the Government and supporters of abortion to have legislation. The Minister, rightly, disclosed to us the Garda Commissioner's clear advice that the proposed zones are not necessary. The Minister, nonetheless, clings to the view that he still wants to legislate. What is also interesting was that he told us he had not received legal advice that he could not do so. I had to put it to him, as opposed to the Minister acknowledging, that there is a considerable body of European convention and European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence which would very much defend freedom of expression, in particular, peaceful freedom of expression. I also drew his attention to the fact that the precedent of the case of Open Door Counselling and Dublin Well Woman, in 1993, may well incidentally protect women where they might feel conflicted, pressurised, harassed or rushed to approach an abortion, and that they would have a right to receive information that might be peacefully and respectfully on offer.

I am sorry to say that while the Minister proposes to talk to gardaí and abortion providers, he refused, when I asked him to do so, to commit to talk to people who advocate best practice in terms of peaceful witnessing to positive alternatives to abortion. I held a briefing to which everybody here was invited some months ago, where we heard from Alina Dulgheriu from the Be Here For Me organisation. She told how when she approached an abortion facility in Britain she only wanted somebody to tell her that she could cope. She did meet such a person in the context of a peaceful witness to positive alternatives to abortion.

The Senator is over time.

Now Ms Dulgheriu is doing the same good Samaritan kind of work herself.

The Senator says that every day.

It is really unfortunate that the Minister for Health and his staff are not interested in meeting such people. Instead, they seem to be in hock to the abortion industry and only interested in depicting opposition to abortion, publicly expressed, as something that is somehow hostile or denigratory when what is clear from the Garda Commissioner's letter is that it is very much the opposite. It is peaceful and it is not a threat to public order. I would be grateful if we could have a debate on the matter in order to flesh out the Garda Commissioner's advice and to discover why there is advice that seems to run so contrary to the stated intentions of Government at this time.