Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

My problem with that is that this issue was addressed by virtue of the definitions contained in the heads of the Bill, to which this committee gave very detailed consideration, and gave rise to no difficulty or controversy. I do not believe there is anyone in this room, in any of the political parties or among the Independents, or anyone outside this House who would be of the view that a medical intervention that can ensure that a very serious genetically inherited physiological difficulty is corrected should not be carried out. In the context of the hearings that this committee held - I followed them with great interest, and a very interesting report was produced - I am not aware of anyone mentioning a problem with regard to the definitions that were used.

The difficulty with the Bill is that it is dealing with aspects of reproduction. What the Bill was originally intended to do was to identify parentage in the area of assisted reproduction. It is doing that in a variety of ways. A different formula is being adopted, and we will come to that shortly. I must say, frankly, that there are issues in this Bill that I envisaged would have been dealt with as part of a consultative process that the Minister of Health would undertake. Why that consultative process did not occur earlier is a mystery to me, because it was my understanding that it would have commenced fairly shortly after the heads of the Bill were published in January 2014. The Bill seems to be dealing with some aspects of reproduction, and in fact - I am coming back specifically to the issue - it is dealing with some areas that it probably should not be dealing with and omitting other areas that it should be dealing with. The point is that there are rules and specifics in the Bill with regard to whether anonymous donors are allowed or not allowed, and I am not sure whether we have touched on that. Yet the Bill seems to be progressing at a great rate this morning without the sections being examined beyond amendments.