Katharine Bulbulia | |
|---|---|
| Senator | |
| In office 8 October 1981 – 1 November 1989 | |
| Constituency | Administrative Panel |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Katharine O'Carroll 1943 (age 81–82) County Waterford, Ireland |
| Political party | |
| Spouse | Abdul Bulbulia |
| Children | 3 |
| Education | Sacred Heart of Mary convent, Waterford |
| Alma mater | |
Katharine Bulbulia (née O'Carroll; born 1943)[1] is a former politician fromCounty Waterford inIreland. She was aFine Gaelsenator from 1981 to 1989, and subsequently joined theProgressive Democrats (PDs), serving from 1997 to 2006 as a senior aide to the party's leader.
She is a former director of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency, a government-sponsored body planning and co-ordinating body established to formulate and implement a strategy to address the issue of crisis pregnancy in Ireland.[2] She was also a member of theAWEPA Governing Council.[3]
Katharine O'Carroll was born in Dublin, but relocated to Waterford at a young age where she was educated at the Sacred Heart of Mary convent, before taking a diploma in household management at St. Mary's College inCathal Brugha Street, Dublin (now the College of Catering of theDublin Institute of Technology). She subsequently graduated fromUniversity College Dublin with aBachelor of Arts degree and a Higher Diploma in Education, before working as a teacher.[4]
She is married to Abdul Bulbulia, ageneral practitioner in Waterford.[5] They have one daughter and two sons.[4]
A founder member of the Waterford branch of the Women's Political Association,[4] Bulbulia joinedFine Gael in the late 1970s, when the party's leaderGarret FitzGerald was encouraging more women to join. She stood as a Fine Gael candidate forTramore in the1979 local elections, where she topped the poll and became the first woman ever elected toWaterford County Council. She was later elected as well toWaterford City Council, and served from 1979 as a member of theSouth-Eastern Health Board.[4] On the Health Board, she fought to overturn the blocking by local officials of the distribution of a book calledThe Book of the Child, published by Ireland's Health Education Bureau, because it included a page about contraception.[6]
Bulbulia then stood unsuccessfully as a Fine Gael candidate for theWaterford constituency at three general elections:1981,November 1982, and1989.[7] After her 1981 defeat, she was elected to the15th Seanad on theAdministrative Panel, and re-elected three times until her defeat at the 1989 election to the19th Seanad.
Martin Cullen the Progressive Democrats TD for Waterford, defected toFianna Fáil after the a dispute over candidate selection for the1994 European Parliament election, and Bulbulia then joined the PDs. She stood as the PD candidate in Waterford at the1997 general election, but again failed to win a seat.[7] However, theRainbow coalition government was defeated in the election, and anew coalition government was formed betweenFianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats. Bulbulia was appointed as programme manager to theTánaiste, PD leaderMary Harney, a post she held for nine years until Harney was replaced as leader in September 2006 byMichael McDowell. The job, which carried at the end a salary of €140,000 a year, involved daily liaison with the Taoiseach's programme manager, Gerry Hickey. That working relationship formed the main channel of communication between the two parties in the coalition. Bulbulia also played an important role in communicating with other members of the PD parliamentary party about the decisions taken at Government level.[8]
Harney stayed on asMinister for Health after resigning the party leadership, and in November 2006 she appointed Bulbulia as chair of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency.[9] The previous week, her husband Abdul had been appointed to a new Government technical advisory group on HIV/AIDS and other global communicable diseases.[10] He had previously been appointed byBrian Cowen (Harney's predecessor as Minister for Health) as a member of theMedical Council of Ireland, where he initiated moves which led in 2001 to a softening of the Council's guidelines on abortion.[11]
Her appointment was criticised by theanti-abortionFamily and Life group, who condemned Bulbulia for having opposed the 1983Anti-abortion amendment to theConstitution of Ireland.[12] The following year the agency came into conflict with the Catholic pregnancy counselling agencyCURA, when it refused to renewCURA's €654,000 contract to provide advice to pregnant women. In 2005,CURA had stopped distributing the Agency'sPositive Options leaflet after Bishops objected to its inclusion of information on abortion, in breach of its contract with the Crisis Pregnancy Agency, and in May 2007 Bulbulia said that it was up to CURA to look at the agency's terms and conditions to see if they could abide by them.[13] The contract was not renewed, and in October 2007 the Irish episcopal conference instructed its chief negotiator, BishopJohn Fleming, not to sign a new contract with the Crisis Pregnancy Agency unless the church's "absolute" opposition to abortion was respected.[14]