Ethical subsidiarity lets others do the dirty work

THOSE opposed to destructive research on living human embryos have reason to be aghast with the Government for misrepresenting the significance of last Monday’s vote at the EU council of ministers.

Before the vote, Minister Micheál Martin claimed he was defending “ethical subsidiarity”, a notion as incoherent as it is irrelevant to what was really at issue.

The controversy surrounding the vote was actually about whether EU taxpayers (including Irish taxpayers) should be forced to fund research that required the deliberate destruction of human embryos, under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).