Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

It is a very good thing that Private Members' Bills are published from the Opposition side of the House. I hope we will come to a point where Private Members' Bills can be accepted and developed on Committee Stage. I regret that is not possible with this Bill. I do not want Deputy McConalogue to take personally any criticism I now make of the Bill because I am conscious that he was not a Deputy in the previous Dáil. Perhaps he has been walked into this Bill by his colleagues.

For a great number of years I wanted to see our adoption laws changed and this issue addressed so that where a child is born to a married couple in circumstances where there is no reasonable possibility of the child being properly cared for by the parents the child would have a real opportunity to be part of a constitutional family by way of adoption and not left in residential or foster care. Many foster parents have children in long-term care with them and would like to adopt those children but cannot do so at present.

Deputy McConalogue should not take this personally but I am assuming he has been walked into this or he has published this Bill out of a lack of information and naivety. The Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children dealt with this issue and, following two years of deliberations, it made a comprehensive proposal for a children's rights amendment, which envisaged this issue also being addressed. It was recommended in the committee's report that, because of concerns that during a referendum campaign the proposal on adoption might be misrepresented, it was important that all the necessary work would be done to publish a draft Bill, as was done with the publication of the Family Law (Divorce) Bill 1996 as a prelude to the divorce referendum, in order that the public would not only have a constitutional amendment to consider but would know the substance of the legislation that would be enacted should the referendum be successful.

Having watched Fianna Fáil in government for 14 years doing absolutely nothing productive to ensure a referendum in this area, having gone through the difficulties of two years of deliberations as a member of a joint Oireachtas committee that produced a consensus on a constitutional amendment, and having watched the then Government ignore the amendment and the former Minister of State with responsibility for children's affairs - whom on a personal level I liked and whom I have some sympathy for in losing his seat - dancing on the head of a pin trying to explain, having sat through those deliberations and agreed to the publication, why he was unable to bring forward an amendment wording to facilitate a referendum before the election, it is little short of cynical and nauseating that this Bill has been published in this way and in this truncated form, ignoring entirely all the related issues of children's rights and the recommendation made carefully by the committee on which Deputy Ó Caoláin, the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs and I sat that it was an important part of the architecture of this legislation and it was a crucial necessity in advance of a referendum that the necessary adoption Bill to accompany a referendum proposal be published. That has not happened.

The alacrity with which the Fianna Fáil Party, after all those years in government, has produced this measure, which is a short but inadequate extract from the comprehensive children's rights amendment published, is extraordinary. A commitment given by Fianna Fáil in government to hold a referendum on children's rights was utterly ignored and never met. A commitment to agree to the holding of a referendum based on the wording of a joint Oireachtas committee was never kept, yet barely three and a half months since the general election, all of a sudden there is an enthusiasm to hold a referendum dealing with two areas that need to be addressed to protect children's rights and to propose that the referendum be held without the necessary legislation being published in circumstances in which the success of the referendum could be at serious risk. In the absence of the publication of the draft Bill, there is a problem, which we saw in the work we did at the joint Oireachtas committee. I very much appreciate the Deputy was not part and parcel of that work and does not have the insight we had. We dealt with some groups who made representations to the committee on the basis that such a proposal was not being considered in the interests of the welfare of children and it was an invidious proposal to remove children from married couples and to break up happy families.

It was not such a proposal. It is in the vital interests of the welfare of children that this provision ultimately forms part of a children's rights amendment but it must do so in circumstances in which the Constitution recognises the importance of the welfare of the child and gives some primacy to children's best interests. Such a provision is not contained in this proposal either. I appreciate the Deputy may have published this with the best will in the world but it is misconceived, grossly inadequate and it is dangerous because clearly no work has been done on producing the legislation. If the party opposite was serious, I would have been delighted to discover that the draft Bill on adoption was available in the files in the Department of Children and Youth Affairs but it does not exist. If it existed, it could have been published conjunction with this. I regretfully have to conclude by saying I fully support the approach taken by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs. I invite the Deputy not to put this to a vote later and to withdraw this Bill.

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