Ms Sandra Irwin-Gowran:

I will speak on behalf of GLEN. Dr. Fergus Ryan, who is a board member of GLEN and lecturer in law in NUI Maynooth, will contribute to the discussions later.

I thank the committee for the opportunity afforded to the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, GLEN, to contribute to the committee's deliberations on this vitally important Bill, which is, perhaps, the greatest and most needed family law reform in a generation. I acknowledge and thank the Minister and his officials at the Department for the extensive work that has been done to date on the Bill.

This Bill will directly benefit the significant numbers of children living in many differently shaped and sized families that are common in Ireland. It will give practical and real expression to the principle of the best interests of the child and will provide much needed legal security to children in many different family forms, including children being raised by lesbian and gay headed families.

The provisions of the Bill are utterly necessary and we stress the urgency with which this Bill needs to be passed.

For GLEN, I suppose, any reform in this area needs to be guided by three clear principles: one, the best interests of the child principle; two, the right of a child to know his or her identity; and three, the right of a child to have his or her family recognised and supported. I will expand a little on each of those.

GLEN is a proud member of the Children's Rights Alliance and strongly supports the application of the best interest principle to all matters concerning the child. The fact of the matter is that every child who is being parented in a lesbian or gay headed family lives without the protection of a secure legal framework. This means that the child lives without a legal relationship with his or her non-biological parent and that has potentially far-reaching consequences whereby the child can be separated from his or her non-biological parent in the event of death or separation. In the case of the family home, maintenance and inheritance, the child's financial welfare is not secure. There are other day-to-day issues as well. A number of the heads will resolve these inequalities. In particular, head 32 ensures that the best interests of the child will be the paramount consideration in areas such as guardianship, custody, upbringing of or access to a child. Part 2 provides much needed amendments to the Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act 2010 regarding shared home, maintenance and provisions upon dissolution of a civil partnership, and GLEN strongly welcomes those provisions.

GLEN fully supports a child's right to know his or her biological and genetic identity and to have his or her family recognised and supported. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises these rights alongside a child's right to be cared for by his or her parents. The convention recognises that a parent can be someone who is not biologically related to the child, a person who takes responsibility for and cares for the child. Heads 10 and 11 reflect this interpretation by providing a framework for the recognition of parentage in cases of assisted reproduction. There are further provisions for guardianship in heads 38 and 39. GLEN is of the view that taken together these provisions will address many of the needs of children being parented by lesbian and gay headed families to a secure legal relationship with their parents.

Alongside the provisions for all couples planning parenthood through assisted reproduction, the Bill also proposes to address retrospective assignment of parentage, and we welcome this. Assignment of parentage involves the consent of the intending, the biological and the genetic parents. We would propose that the principle of fully informed consent should include independent, legal and counselling advice for both the biological, genetic and intending parents. We would strongly suggest that where there is agreement between all parties, the assignment of parentage should be provided through the most effective and simplest of means in order to ensure that the provisions of heads 10 and 11 are as widely accessible as possible.

Finally, on the area of adoption, there is no ban on adoption by lesbian and gay single persons in Ireland.

Lesbian and gay people can and do apply to and adopt children. However, lesbian and gay couples, even those in a civil partnership, cannot apply to adopt jointly. Consequently, GLEN, while recognising that adoption is ultimately about a child’s right to a family, welcomes the provisions in the general scheme to extend the categories of people who can apply to include civil-partnered couples. We also welcome the recognition of adoptions from other countries. This is a very important provision for many lesbian and gay couples who have adopted jointly abroad. The Bill does not provide for second-parent adoption. We suggest that this be provided for as the Bill is devolved further.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to contribute and I look forward to the discussion.