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

May I respond? It is relevant because there is a connection between the children to whom the sections apply and the process whereby declarations of parentage are sought in the District Court. We sometimes think we have to invent wheels that have long since been invented in other countries. I do not know the exact statistics but as far as I am aware, there have been many thousands conceived and born over the past 30 years as a result of assisted reproduction by donor. Many of them are now adults getting on with their lives and not all are living in Ireland. Members of the committee may not be aware of this but we used to have what were known as "presumptions of paternity". Mothers in our law were always individuals who gave birth but the issue was often who was the father.

There were presumptions of paternity. If a married woman gave birth to a child, the presumption was that her husband was the father. Now we are living in a more complex world of assisted reproduction where children are being conceived by donated ova and sperm. In other jurisdictions they move from presumptions of paternity to presumptions of parentage and the architecture used in the draft Bill provided for presumptions of parentage and was based on international precedence that had worked well in a variety of other countries. It was not a reinvention of a wheel that does not work; it was the transplanting of a wheel into our legislation that has proved to work well.

The Minister has said that presumptions of parentage are taken out of the Bill. In the context of couples who have fertility issues in the context of using donated sperm or ova, or even now, in the context of the issue I raised previously, where one may need a small intervention in a married woman's ova or in a gay woman's ova to correct an inherited difficulty, presumptions of parentage become a lot more important. I do not understand why presumptions of parentage are taken out of the Bill. I genuinely do not understand it. Happily, it has nothing to do with the Department of Health. It is to provide some degree of certainty as to the parentage of children in circumstances where issues might arise. It is a good idea that one not only has the presumption, but that the parents of a child, or the child himself or herself, has the facility to make application to the court to get a declaration of parentage but that was always in the draft Bill.

We currently have in our law provisions that derive from the Status of Children Act 1987 where one can make application to the courts for declarations as to parentage or paternity. I urge the Minister to reintroduce the presumptions on Report Stage. It is a serious issue. I do not think one can say one will only recognise that the people who have cared for a child born through assisted reproduction throughout the child's life are the true parents of the child if they make a court application and get a court declaration. If that invitation is taken up and if presumptions are not in the Bill, there could be thousands of applications taken to our courts which could be snowed under in trying to deal with them, albeit I appreciate they may not be contested applications. The volume of those applications could be enormous. There is also the blindingly obvious issue of should individuals incur legal costs in having to make those applications where there is no inter family dispute as to who the child is and who should be regarded as his or her parents and there is no conflict as to whether the parents consented to the use of assisted reproduction.