Anguish about the high levels of suicide among young people was expressed at the Presbyterian General Assembly in Belfast yesterday.
The Rev Mairisine Stanfield, who is based at Ballynahinch, quoted a local newspaper which said the town had the highest suicide rate in western Europe. "It has been desperate, as you can imagine," she told the assembly.
She spoke of a recent visit by the former moderator, Dr Sam Hutchinson. He had been in Ballynahinch to dedicate an organ at the church. "We left feeling good, to discover later that another young man in the town had died. He had been with his family and just went to the garage and hanged himself," she said.
Doctors had told her so many of the young men who committed suicide gave no warning. She had been reading newspaper reports of proceedings at the General Assembly and one account of a minister who said that now was a hopeful time to be alive in this country. "Many of our young people feel there is no hope," she said.
Speaking about abortion, the Rev Norman Cameron urged the assembly to resist any attempts by the British government to liberalise legislation in the North through "clarification". He recognised there were hard cases, such as rape, abnormality and serious handicap, "but we need to understand that over 90 per cent of the 177,000 abortions per year [in the UK] are under the social clause [of the 1967 Abortion Act]," he said.
