On behalf of the Government and Morals Committee, may I extend our sincere thanks to the hundreds of people who turned out for the abortion protest.Well done and thank you to everyone who gave of their time and supported the event. We greatly appreciate your commitment and participation. At least the weather was kind to us! It was noted that City Hall was not lit green as had been expected. A special word of thanks to everyone who participated through prayer, Bible readings, personal testimonies and preaching. It was truly an answer to prayer that so many took the stand against the illumination of city hall and against the continued murder of the unborn in this province.
Rev. D. McLaughlin
Several hundred people gathered on the granite forecourt of Belfast City Hall on the evening of Monday 28 September for a peaceful open-air witness organised by the Government and Morals Committee of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, with a further thousand supporters from other pro-life groups standing in solidarity around Donegall Square. The service was led by the Reverend David McLaughlin, and the principal address was delivered by the Moderator, Dr Ian Brown of Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church.
The occasion carried a particular significance. The City Hall was not, in the end, lit in green. The illumination had been approved by the Council in August on an Alliance Party motion brought at the request of the National Women’s Council of Ireland, and ratified in September. But the DUP invoked the call-in procedure under the Local Government Act (Northern Ireland) 2014, obliging the Council to obtain a legal opinion that was not ready in time. The National Women’s Council arranged an alternative projection on the MAC building instead. The campaign against the proposal had been substantial: the Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor, Dr Alan McGuckian, wrote to all sixty councillors, more than twenty thousand people signed a petition, a legal challenge was lodged, and an open letter from Christian and pro-life groups called on the Council to reject the proposal outright.
The organisers were careful not to claim more than had been won. The Council’s vote still stands, the motion was passed, and the call-in suspends the decision pending legal advice rather than reversing it. The substance of the grievance, as every speaker made plain, is untouched by a delayed light show.
Before the address, Mr Kyle Boyd of Crossgar, born at twenty-nine weeks with cerebral palsy, testified that under the laws of 2026 he would probably not have been born at all, and asked who would stand for the voiceless.
Dr Brown took as his text Proverbs 31:8: “Open thy mouth for the dumb, in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction.” He noted that green signifies nature, growth, birth and hope, and that to use such a colour to mark abortion is to turn reality upon its head; had the Council wished to be honest, the colour should have been red, “murderous, guilty red.” He set out the global figure of approximately seventy-three million abortions each year, and the change in our own province, where a regime that once recorded ten to fifteen abortions annually now records nearly ten per day: 11,192 between March 2020 and March 2025, an entire town the size of Castlederg wiped out each year.
His exegetical case rested on the same Greek word, brephos, used of the unborn John, the newborn Christ, and the children brought to Jesus; on Genesis 1, where only of human life is it said, “Let us make man in our image”; and on Exodus 21, where the loss of the unborn child is met with “life for life.” He invoked Bonhoeffer and Wilberforce, declaring abortion the great slavery issue of the twenty-first century, and closed with a word to those wounded by abortion, setting before the gathering the choice of life in Christ. The service concluded with prayer by the Reverend Gordon Dane.
The City Hall stood in its usual colours behind them. The regulations remain in force, the services remain commissioned, and the unborn of Northern Ireland remain as unprotected as before. As the Moderator made plain, a light that did not come on is no substitute for laws repealed.
