Dr. Geoffrey Shannon:

That is an excellent question. Both parties can agree to appoint the father as a guardian. Like Treoir which will make a presentation this afternoon, it is the society's submission that a register should be established in that context. We are conscious that there are practical difficulties. It is the case that if both parties agree to the appointment of the father as guardian, the arrangement is effected under Statutory Instrument No. 5 of 1998. The difficulty is that if one loses that statutory form, one effectively loses the evidence that one has been appointed as guardian. We are suggesting a register of guardians should be established and that it could perhaps, for consistency, be located in the same place as the registers of births and marriages. Again, we are sensitive to the fact that there are practical issues involved.

The Bill is progressive in creating a new system under which a birth father who has been cohabiting with his partner for a period of 12 months will obtain automatic guardianship rights. Our submission is that this temporal requirement should be reduced to six months or removed. In its final consultation paper the Law Reform Commission recommended that there be no temporal requirement. We submit that this approach should be considered by the committee.