Katharine Bulbulia

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 in Cathal Brugha Street, Dublin (now the College of Catering of the Dublin Institute of Technology). She subsequently graduated from University College Dublin with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Higher Diploma in Education, before working as a teacher. She is married to Abdul Bulbulia, a general practitioner in Waterford. They have one daughter and two sons. ==Political career==

A founder member of the Waterford branch of the Women's Political Association, Bulbulia then stood unsuccessfully as a Fine Gael candidate for the Waterford constituency at three general elections: 1981, November 1982, and 1989. After her 1981 defeat, she was elected to the 15th Seanad on the Administrative Panel, and re-elected three times until her defeat at the 1989 election to the 19th Seanad. Martin Cullen the Progressive Democrats TD for Waterford, defected to Fianna Fáil after the a dispute over candidate selection for the 1994 European Parliament election, and Bulbulia then joined the PDs. She stood as the PD candidate in Waterford at the 1997 general election, but again failed to win a seat. Harney stayed on as Minister for Health after resigning the party leadership, and in November 2006 she appointed Bulbulia as chair of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency. The previous week, her husband Abdul had been appointed to a new Government technical advisory group on HIV/AIDS and other global communicable diseases. He had previously been appointed by Brian Cowen (Harney's predecessor as Minister for Health) as a member of the Medical Council of Ireland, where he initiated moves which led in 2001 to a softening of the council's guidelines on abortion. Her appointment was criticised by the anti-abortion Family and Life group, who condemned Bulbulia for having opposed the 1983 Anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution of Ireland. The following year the agency came into conflict with the Catholic pregnancy counselling agency CURA, when it refused to renew CURAs €654,000 contract to provide advice to pregnant women. In 2005, CURA had stopped distributing the Agency's Positive 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. The contract was not renewed, and in October 2007 the Irish episcopal conference instructed its chief negotiator, Bishop John Fleming, not to sign a new contract with the Crisis Pregnancy Agency unless the church's "absolute" opposition to abortion was respected. ==References==