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IRELAND
Abortion on the riseMore women travel abroad
A record number of Irish women traveled to Britain for an abortion last year, according to provisional figures from the English Office for National Statistics. The 1999 figures show that 6,214 abortions were carried out on women giving addresses in the Republic of Ireland. For the previous year, 5,891 Irishwomen went to Britain for abortions. The Irish Family Planning Association said the statistics could not be regarded as complete, as they represented only women who gave Irish addresses.
The Pro-Life Campaign (PLC) blamed the latest figures on Ireland’s 1995 Information Act, which permitted the publication of addresses and contact numbers for British abortion clinics. A PLC spokesman said that the Act, which allowed abortion clinics to advertise in the Irish media, had “singularly failed in its stated intention of reducing abortions.” He called on the government to consider the evidence of the US-based Caring Foundation, which showed that, “when the conditions pressuring women towards abortion are addressed, the incidence of abortion can be slowed down and even reversed.”
The overall abortion figure for England and Wales last year was 183,200—down from the record 187,400 in 1998.
Seminaries closing
Steady decline in candidates for priesthood
Despite the Vatican’s recent announcement that the worldwide priestly vocations crisis is over, the number of candidates for the priesthood in Ireland continues to plummet, according to a report in the Catholic Times.
Ireland was once the chief exporter of missionary priests to Britain and the US, but according to the report, latest figures show that the number of seminarians has dropped from 750 in 1970 to 91 new entrants last year, while ordinations fell from 259 to 43 over the same period. Father Martin Clarke, a spokesman for the Irish bishops’ conference, pointed out that Ireland still has one of the highest ratios of priests to lay people in the world, and denied that the Church there is experiencing a crisis of priestly vocations. “It’s part declericalization,” he said. “There are now about 1,500 lay people training, whereas in the past it would have been 1,500 seminarians. Obviously, it’s a very changed situation, but we are still very well provided for in the level of service on the ground compared with elsewhere in the world.”