Gaelic Athletes for Life Calling for a NO Vote

Join Gaelic Athletes For Life

“The mission statement in the GAA’s Strategic Plan assures us that “We actively seek to engage with and include all members of our society.” We are an inclusive organisation. There is a space for everybody at our table.

Sport is a place where people come together to test themselves, to strive for greatness, to fulfil their potential, and to express their unique gifts as part of a team.

Working together, we become one team, one society, one nation, and one human race. Those are our principles – inclusiveness, compassion, respect, dignity, teamwork. In keeping with those principles, we are coming together today to ask the Irish people to vote NO on May 25th.

The proposal the Government has put forward is not inclusive. It specifically seeks to exclude one group of people, the unborn, from our society. It strips them of rights, it declares that they are not on our team. The proposal is not compassionate. It would allow abortions up to six months of gestation. It would allow healthy babies, of healthy mothers, to be killed for any reason.

The proposal is not respectful. It would compel hospital porters, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists to take part in abortions even if they believe, in the deepest pits of their being, that they were being asked to do something terribly wrong.

The proposal strips away our dignity. It asks us to condone abortion not just in the difficult cases, but for healthy children, for any reason. These children will not get a coffin, or a burial, or a funeral. They will be treated as if they did not exist.

Finally, the proposal fails the test of teamwork. This is a society of people of many talents, with boundless potential and vast resources. If we work together, we can come up with a better solution than to cast away the rights of our unborn children and call it a solution. We can, and we must, do better.

Many young men and women are wondering how to vote. We ask them, before they do, to look at the values of our society, and to look at the country we live in today. We value everybody in our organisation, from the brightest stars to the child with a disability. We value them because we are a caring and compassionate society that says that every one of us has the right to fulfil our potential.

We respect and cherish women. We support them, and we believe that as a society, we have much more, so much more, to offer our women than the death of their children. We’re asking people to vote NO.”