Editorial: DUP should tell America of the restrictions in Northern Ireland on anti abortion protests

​Look at the map that we have published on page six of Belfast city centre.

​Belfast City Hall is trailing off the bottom right hand corner of the map.

We have drawn a semi circle around the medical unit on College Street that could be the subject of an abortion protest exclusion zone.

This circle shows a line with a radius of 130 metres, and as you can see it means a large zone in which even silent prayer will be excluded.

These disgraceful anti protest zones can be extended up to 250m but, as is apparent, they are quite bad enough at half that distance.

This is utterly appalling and a major failing of Stormont.

Not only should the DUP be going to Washington on St Patrick’s Day, it should – if an invitation is not extended to save the blushes of Sinn Fein – protest outside the White House during any reception, pointing out that it has been uninvited to help Irish republicans who hate every aspect of US foreign policy, when unionists normally agree with such a worldview.

Then the DUP should have placards with maps and images of these disgraceful anti protest exclusion zones in the UK that the US president JD Vance was so justified in criticising in his recent Munich address on affronts to free speech.

These exclusions are particularly shameful in Northern Ireland, which until recently had some of the strictest restrictions on abortion in the western world. Now you can’t even silently pray near to a facility where an emerging child is being killed in the womb.

Whoever thought, when there were calls for the limited use of terminations in cases of so-called fatal foetal abnormality, that NI would soon not only have far more abortions than in those tiny number of cases but, in effect, abortion on demand, but also would not allow protests against it.