‘Fringe’ group blamed for posted cartridges

“FRINGE” pro-life activists were last night blamed for threatening letters and shotgun cartridges being sent to two government ministers and at least two fertility clinics.

A Garda investigation is under way after Health Minister Mary Harney and her predecessor in that department, Enterprise Minister Micheál Martin, both received packages containing a letter and a cartridge from a previously unknown group calling itself the “Irish Citizens Defence Force”.

The packages were delivered to their respective offices on February 29.

The Sims Fertility Clinic in Dublin and the Clane Hospital in Kildare, which offers fertility treatment, received similar packages.

The Sims clinic also received a hoax bomb in a separate, video-sized package, according to its founder and medical director, Dr Anthony Walsh.

The Government was remaining tight-lipped about the packages last night, not wishing to encourage those responsible.

But Dr Walsh said the letters were damning of the work carried out by the fertility clinics.

“[They were] saying that we’re destroying embryos, etc, which is completely inaccurate,” he said.

The letters to the ministers are understood to have addressed the same issue.

Dr Walsh blamed a “fringe element”, saying there was a long history of pro-life splinter groups taking issue with developments in reproductive medicine.

“It seems to be that reproduction and fringe groups go hand in hand, and people are always vying for the right to be involved and controlling other people’s decisions on reproduction, and this is a classical manifestation of that,” he told RTÉ Radio.

Dr Walsh criticised government reluctance to tackle issues around assisted human reproduction [AHR], saying the “indecision and failure of the legislators to move quickly on this allows fringe elements such as these people... to mount an operation like this”.

Pro-life activists are opposed to in vitro fertilisation because numerous embryos may be frozen or discarded during such treatment. Activists say this amounts to destruction of human life. But Dr Walsh and other fertility experts argue that implantation is when the life process begins.

Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution provides protection for the “unborn”. But in its May 2005 report, the government-appointed Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction said it was “not clear whether protection applies from fertilisation or from some subsequent point in the process”.

The Commission urged the Government to introduce laws to regulate AHR in Ireland, but to date, no such legislation has been introduced.

In November 2006, the High Court ruled that the protection of the unborn envisaged in Article 40.3.3 did not extend to embryos.