TAOISEACH Enda Kenny has received angry emails from
voters threatening him with excommunication from the Catholic Church if
he allowed abortion "on his watch".
It comes after he recently told the Dail that he was going to
press on with the abortion bill because he was a Taoiseach who was a
Catholic "but not a Catholic Taoiseach".
And on the other side, he also received some deeply personal emails from women urging him to allow abortions for unborn babies with fatal foetal abnormalities here – rather than forcing them to travel to England.
However, one voter wrote to Mr Kenny to tell him that he should save his own soul and step down as leader rather than "opening the door for the killing of innocents" and risking excommunication.
"Procuring an abortion incurs the penalty of excommunication . . . God loves you Taoiseach but he also loves his unborn children and the souls of the innocent girls equally," he said.
It is the first time that messages sent to his office in Government Buildings about the abortion bill have been released under the Freedom of Information Act. Details of correspondence to Mr Kenny's office reveal dozens of emotive accusations from voters in the space of a single week.
One email in particular from a Mayo-born person told him he was as mortal as everybody else and would appear in the Court of Heaven in a few years' time.
"Be very careful that you do not have to answer for the murder of thousands of unborn Irish babies. Your attack on the Pope has already secured your place in history and it will be a negative one. Facilitate abortion and your place will rank with that of Cromwell," he wrote.
SLAUGHTER
Another correspondent told him that the country would become a "slaughter house for the unborn" once the floodgates were opened.
"Just remember that murder is murder, and for the love of God, do your best to keep this holocost (sic) out of Ireland," the person wrote.
But he also received a personal plea for the law to be changed from a woman who went to England in 2009 with her husband for an abortion because her baby had a fatal foetal abnormality.
"After the procedure we wandered the streets waiting for our flights. I was bleeding, in pain, recovering from an anaesthetic and grieving for my child . . . this is happening every week. You need to do something to stop this now."
Another woman described how she was
planning to travel to Britain for an abortion because her unborn child
was critically ill and would have no quality of life.
"The
reality is that I will have to go to the UK and probably won't get to
bring my baby home. My little one will end up in the clinic's toxic
waste. How would you feel in this position?" she asked Mr Kenny.
One
of the most common warnings is that the person concerned will never
vote for Fine Gael again. One self-proclaimed "lifelong Fine Gael
supporter" complained that he had voted for Fine Gael because of its
"pro-life commitment".
"Now it appears to me that the pro-abortion Labour 'tail' is wagging the Fine Gael dog," he said.
Another
wrote: "If this legislation comes in under your watch, you will have a
lot to answer for. You are opening the gates of hell to this country! As
Mother Teresa put it 'no country has a future which murders its own
babies'."
Mr Kenny got over 70 individual emails in the
space of a week at the end of November last year – when the Government
confirmed it was going to legislate for abortion where a mother's life
was at risk.