Jim Walsh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the fact that many of the submissions acknowledged that the best interests of the child should be the cornerstone of the Bill. Would any witness disagree that the best interests of the child should be absolutely paramount? If so, will they say why not? I expect that everyone agrees and that there will not be an answer to the question. However, if someone disagrees with that statement, I ask them to outline their reasons for disagreeing.
My second question is along similar lines, and I only have two questions. It relates to the issue of the absence of fathers. I will give a short quotation from President Barack Obama and ask witnesses if they would disagree with the points he made and, if so, explain why. It is a speech he gave on fatherhood and missing fathers, in which he said the foundations of families were weaker as a consequence of that. He went on to say later in the speech, and obviously he was speaking to some extent from his own experience:

You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled - doubled - since we were children. We know the statistics - that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioural problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

I believe most witnesses acknowledged in their submissions that the right of the child to know his or her biological and genetic parents was absolute. Would they not agree that just knowing is simply not good enough and that it should involve the participation of that father in the rearing and development of the child? That would obviously exclude the case made by Ms Brady. We are not talking about a child who is a product of rape. That would be untenable to anyone. In the ordinary course of events, however, where the father is not violent and there is no legal or criminal reason he should not be involved, should the State not have the framework to encourage that to happen?